Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Alex Garland

Image
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
Image
The key relationship for writers in film is producers, because those are the first two people involved and the ones who work on it intensely in a private way without the big machinery of film.
Alex Garland
Image
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
Image
As for me... I'm fine. I have bad dreams, but I never saw Mister Duck again. I play video games. I smoke a little dope. I got my thousand-yard stare. I carry a lot of scares. I like the way that sounds. I carry a lot of scares.
Alex Garland
Image
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
Image
I used to think about video games, This is clearly an amazing, new narrative medium, and it's going to be mind-blowing when people get to grips with what's possible within this medium. It took us a century to get really good at film. Video games are at a much earlier stage.
Alex Garland
Image
There are one hundred glow-stars on my bedroom ceiling. (...) Glow-stars are strange. They make the ceiling disappear.
Alex Garland
Image
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
Image
Normally, small talk is enough for me to form an opinion of someone. I make quick judgments, often completely wrong, and then stick by them rigidly.
Alex Garland
Image
Tourists went on holidays while travellers did something else. They travelled.
Alex Garland
Image
The thing about tourism is just that it's incredibly powerful. It's like a gun and it's incredibly easy to be irresponsible with it. And the speed of the impact that tourism can have on a place can be quite breathtaking. It doesn't take years, it takes months. That's how quickly it works. And it can be quite a bleak thing to witness.
Alex Garland
Image
I've written original material before, where I've come up with the idea and the characters myself, and that's definitely very different to working with someone else's characters and stories.
Alex Garland
Image
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
Image
I carry a lot of scars. I like the way that sounds. I carry a LOT of scars.
Alex Garland
Image
If you look at the whole life of the planet, we - you know, Man - has only been around for a few blinks of an eye. So if the infection wipes us all out, that is a return to normality.
Alex Garland
Image
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
Image
Vietnam, me love you long time. All day, all night, me love you long time.
Alex Garland
Image
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
Image
By the time the plane was airborne I'd forgotten England even existed.
Alex Garland
Image
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