A Quote by Roland Joffe

They suggested I should introduce an element of reincarnation in the story. At first, I thought that was silly. But then, this whole time dimension began to fascinate me. — © Roland Joffe
They suggested I should introduce an element of reincarnation in the story. At first, I thought that was silly. But then, this whole time dimension began to fascinate me.
Reincarnation is a story we tell; then in the end it's the story itself that is the reincarnation.
I've always been fascinated by the concept of reincarnation. I learned that many brilliant people were interested in reincarnation, including Carl Jung. I'm a big Jungian. So I began writing novels involving theories integrating past and present, even if the past element in the novel took place 500 or 1,000 years ago.
Talk to people no one else is talking to. Who would have thought that giving a speech at a funeral at age 12 would introduce me to a man who would introduce me to my first business contact who would introduce me to several other important people in my life. That's luck. That's randomness.
I think it was important for me to introduce myself as an artist for the first time because I'm very proud of my past, it's all a part of my story, but this is who I am now. This was a really important thing to have an hour special that lets them in and kind of meet me for the first time, truthfully.
As I see it, a successful story of any kind should be almost like hypnosis: You fascinate the reader with your first sentence, draw them in further with your second sentence and have them in a mild trance by the third. Then, being careful not to wake them, you carry them away up the back alley of your narrative and when they are hopelessly lost within the story, having surrendered themselves to it, you do them terrible violence with a softball bag and then lead them whimpering to the exit on the last page. Believe me, they'll thank you for it.
I am rediscovering the whole sexual dimension of life at the age of 86, really. And that also means discovering the feminine. So the whole of this dimension, which I had been seeking for a very long time, is now sort of opening itself up to me.
For me, the greatest source of frustration was trying to work with a willful child when there was something else I wanted - say, to get the child to go to bed so I could have my own time. Just the promise of the time, and feeling that promise slip away, was enough to introduce a whole other element of stress into the encounter.
The arc of my mind has an equal swing in all directions. I should say the same of your mind if I thought you would believe it. But we are so saturated with the notion that Time is a dimension accessible from one direction only, that you will at first probably be shocked by my saying that I can see truly as far in front of me as I can see exactly behind me.
If you focus on literature through only one small element of it, like the more scientific element of linguistics, then where is the joy that brought us literature in the first place, which is to have a story?
At that time [90th in Lagos], if you drove through the city, you drove through a foreground that always seemed to be incredibly dramatic and incredibly agonised - smoking, burning, incredible compression. In the first year we stayed on the ground and went everywhere. But then in order to discover whether this was the whole story, we rented a helicopter. And we began to understand that this is not chaos but a highly modern system that had been abandoned, then at some point went into reversal, then slowly came out of it.
Reincarnation is an apprehension of a movement and the movement occurs in time. Without time, there is no reincarnation. Reincarnation is a reflection of time in this world.
I'd thought I'd constructed a really wonderful book, and the teacher told me that my story basically began on page fifty, and that I should throw out everything prior, or figure out a way to weave only the most important information back into the story, and keep the action moving forward. Wow. That was a really humbling experience. A real eye-opener. Made me realize there are so many aspects involved with telling a story.
Eternity is not future or past. Eternity is a dimension of now. It is a dimension of the human spirit -- which is eternal. Find that eternal dimension in yourself, and you will ride through time, and throughout the whole length of your days.
You have to start by changing the story you tell yourself about getting older... The minute you say to yourself, 'Time is everything, and I'm going to make sure that time is used the way I dream it should be used,' then you've got a whole different story.
I think about life and death a lot. For the longest time I thought this was it, but then I thought maybe reincarnation does exist and we will all come back. My new thought is either of these could be true, but realistically what is going to happen is when you are dead you are not going to know you are dead, so it's not the end of the world.
I think that when I first suggested the idea that knowledge should be viewed as a natural kind, many people thought this was just crazy.
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