“The threads of a story come from time to time together and make a picture in the web; the characters fall from time to time into some attitude to each other or to nature, which stamps the story home like an illustration.”
— Robert Louis Stevenson, A Gossip on Romance (in Memories and Portraits) (1882)
“Drama is the poetry of conduct, romance the poetry of circumstance.”
— Robert Louis Stevenson, A Gossip on Romance (in Memories and Portraits) (1882)
“Life is monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt and poignant; a work of art, in comparison, is neat, finite, self-contained, rational, flowing and emasculate. Life imposes by brute energy, like inarticulate thunder; art catches the ear, among the far louder noises of experience, like an air artificially made by a discreet musician.”
— Robert Louis Stevenson, A Humble Remonstrance (in Memories and Portraits) (1884)
“Pictures of Action Intimacy and Splendor are the foundation colors in the photoplay, as red, blue, and yellow are the basis of the rainbow.”
— Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (1922)
“And since the pleasure which the poet should afford is that which comes from pity and fear through imitation, it is evident that this quality must be impressed upon the incidents.”
— Aristotle, Poetics (trans. S. H. Butcher)
“Therefore, learn to think of a photoplay as being a story prepared for pantomimic development before the camera; a story told in action, with inserted descriptive matter where the thought might be obscure without its help; a story told in one or more reels, each reel containing from twenty-five to fifty scenes.”
— J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds, Writing the Photoplay (1913)
“The photoplay shows us a significant conflict of human actions in moving pictures which, freed from the physical forms of space, time, and causality, are adjusted to the free play of our mental experiences and which reach complete isolation from the practical world through the perfect unity of plot and pictorial appearance.”
— Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916)
“Every considerable effort to develop a noble idiom will count in the final result, as the writers of early English made possible the language of the Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton.”
— Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (1922)
“Accordingly, the poet should prefer probable impossibilities to improbable possibilities.”
— Aristotle, Poetics (trans. S. H. Butcher)
“This, then, is the plastic part of literature: to embody character, thought, or emotion in some act or attitude that shall be remarkably striking to the mind’s eye.”
— Robert Louis Stevenson, A Gossip on Romance (in Memories and Portraits) (1882)
“A photoplay is a story told largely in pantomime by players, whose words are suggested by their actions, assisted by certain descriptive words thrown on the screen, and the whole produced by a moving-picture machine.”
— J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds, Writing the Photoplay (1913)
“And the best motion picture story for fifty years may turn out to be a reel ten minutes long. Do not let the length of the commercial film tyrannize over your mind, O young art museum photoplay director.”
— Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (1922)
Every quote in this collection was verified
against its original public-domain source — the letter, journal, poem or treatise it
truly comes from. No internet folklore, no misattributions.
Start free to bring these voices into your daily practice.