Quote

What interests me about fiction is plot. And what interests me about plot is whether someone tells a story that moves me within the constraints of storytelling. And I have narrowly defined storytelling.

Malcolm Gladwell

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Malcolm Gladwell
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: September 3
Journalist
Screenwriter
Sociologist
Writer
Malcolm Timothy Gladwell
Someone
Defined
Stories
Interests
Fiction
Within
Narrowly
Story
Constraints
Interest
Plot
Whether
Moves
Moving
Tells

More quotes by Malcolm Gladwell

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What do we tell our children? Haste makes waste. Look before you leap. Stop and think. Don't judge a book by its cover. We believe that we are always better off gathering as much information as possible and spending as much time as possible in deliberation.
Malcolm Gladwell
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People at CDC [Centers for Disease Control] who cut their teeth on diseases over the last 10 years have started to think of crime as another disease, and using some of these same concepts. It was something that was in the air in that world, but it was time to bust it out and apply it to any number of different social epidemics.
Malcolm Gladwell
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What track needs to figure out: how to engage us between the races. Instead, the entire off-the-track conversation is about doping. This is how you kill a sport.
Malcolm Gladwell
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Innovation-the heart of the knowledge economy-is fundamentally social.
Malcolm Gladwell
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Sometimes constraints actually create success. Not being able to swim made me run. And running taught me the discipline I needed as a writer.
Malcolm Gladwell
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What happens when two people talk? That is really the basic question here, because, that's the basic context in which all persuasion takes place.
Malcolm Gladwell
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If a window is broken and left unrepaired, people walking by will conclude that no one cares and no one is in charge. Soon, more windows will be broken, and the sense of anarchy will spread from the building to the street on which it faces, sending a signal that anything goes.
Malcolm Gladwell
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We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction.
Malcolm Gladwell
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Achievement is talent plus preparation. The problem with this view is that the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play.
Malcolm Gladwell
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The face is not a secondary billboard for our internal feelings. It is an equal partner in the emotional process.
Malcolm Gladwell
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For every romantic possiblity, no matter how robust, there exists at least one equal and opposite sentence, phrase, or word capable of extinguishing it.
Malcolm Gladwell
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People can't do much about the fate part, but we can certainly do a lot about the man part.
Malcolm Gladwell
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I worry that track is going to enter into an impossibly complicated stage, where our understanding of the complexities of human physiology - and our ability to accentuate and exploit them - is going to make the notion of pure competition impossible.
Malcolm Gladwell
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There is nothing more common than critics of journalists accusing them of practicing journalism. It is our function in the world to take things that are complicated and render them in a form that non-experts can follow and make sense of.
Malcolm Gladwell
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It's very hard to find someone who's successful and dislikes what they do.
Malcolm Gladwell
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That was it! The whole Redwood City philosophy was based on a willingness to try harder than anyone else.
Malcolm Gladwell
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Policy is driven by more than politics, however. It is equally driven by ideas.
Malcolm Gladwell
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Courage is what you earn when you've been through the tough times and you discover they aren't so tough after all.
Malcolm Gladwell
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When writing, you can't break physical rules. You can't have people come back from the dead. That's cheating. I am a kind of narrative fundamentalist in many ways.
Malcolm Gladwell
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As human beings, we always expect everyday change to happen slowly and steadily, and for there to be some relationship between cause and effect.
Malcolm Gladwell