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I wrote a whole novel before The Beach. Unpublishable. Junk. But, for some reason I stuck at novels and wrote a second. Still not sure why I didn't give up. Stubborn, maybe.

Alex Garland

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Alex Garland
Age: 54
Born: 1970
Born: May 26
Film Director
Film Producer
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
London
England
Alexander Medawar Garland
Still
Wrote
Reason
Second
Whole
Novel
Giving
Maybe
Junk
Sure
Stubborn
Didn
Novels
Stills
Beach
Give
Stuck

More quotes by Alex Garland

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The first I heard of the beach was in Bangkok, on the Ko Sanh Road.
Alex Garland
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Of course witnessing poverty was the first to be ticked off the list. Then I had to graduate to the more obscure stuff. Being in a riot was something I pursued with a truly obsessive zeal, along with being tear-gassed and hearing gunshots fired in anger.
Alex Garland
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It slightly depends on your perspective, sort of how you look at these things, but when I sit down to write a script, I'm not planning to write a script I'm planning to make a film, and so I only see the script as being just a step there.
Alex Garland
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Escape through travel works. Almost from the moment I boarded my flight, life in England became meaningless. Seat-belt signs lit up, problems switched off. Broken armrests took precedence over broken hearts. By the time the plane was airborne I'd forgotten England even existed.
Alex Garland
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Every dream that anyone ever has is theirs alone and they never manage to share it. And they never manage to remember it either. Not truly or accurately. Not as it was. Our memories and our vocabularies aren't up to the job.
Alex Garland
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Well, if there's an infinite amount of chances for something to happen, then eventually it will happen - no matter how small the likelihood.
Alex Garland
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There's one massive problem with coming from writing novels into screenplays that I've discovered over the years, which is that you've got too much facility on the page. In novels, you can persuade people of things that work that don't really work.
Alex Garland
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Though I walk through the valley of death I will fear no evil, for I am the evilest motherfucker in the valley
Alex Garland
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I can kid people, including myself, into believing that something on the page will work. But when you film it, you just think, Oh ....
Alex Garland
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I carry a lot of scars. I like the way that sounds. I carry a LOT of scars.
Alex Garland
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I think everything I write is from an atheist perspective. I mean, it's partly from an atheist perspective because I'm an atheist, and I'm just not really interested in religious-based questions.
Alex Garland
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There are one hundred glow-stars on my bedroom ceiling. (...) Glow-stars are strange. They make the ceiling disappear.
Alex Garland
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Uh... what can I say? Made money. Given a launch pad for a working life. Set a precedent I had no interest in following. Created expectations that I was not cut-out to match. Disappointed virtually all of my readers subsequently. But I like what I've done, and I stand by it all.
Alex Garland
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Waking was the most reliable part of a dream, as built into dreams as death is to life. You dream, you wake: you live, you die.
Alex Garland
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I knew my affection for the Philippines was equally as telling: a democracy on paper, apparently well ordered, regularly subverted by irrational chaos. A place where I'd felt instantly at home.
Alex Garland
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The truth is, I hadn't grown up really wanting to be a writer. The whole thing was a weird aberration in some ways, and I didn't feel personally connected to the level of success I had with it - the success of sorts, I guess.
Alex Garland
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There's this saying: in an all-blue world, colour doesn't exist... If something seems strange, you question it but if the outside world is too distant to use as a comparison then nothing seems strange.
Alex Garland
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Vietnam, me love you long time. All day, all night, me love you long time.
Alex Garland
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I don't like dealing with money transactions in poor countries. I get confused between the feeling that I shouldn't haggle with poverty and getting ripped off
Alex Garland
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Vietnam, me love you long time. All day, all night, me love you long time. (...) Dropping acid on the Mekong Delta, smoking grass through a rifle barrel, flying on a helicopter with opera blasting out of loudspeakers, tracer-fire and paddy-field scenery, the smell of napalm in the morning. Long time.
Alex Garland