Creator Breakdown/Quotes

Dark is a valid direction to take something, but I think you have to be in a particular place, mentally, to stay there for a while.

—Sean Howard, Ten Things I Learned Writing AMD

You show me an actor doing a shit movie, I'll show you a guy with a bad divorce.

—Bill Murray, speaking at the NBR awards

That's Paul. Apparently he was under strain at that period.

Gen Urobuchi wants to write stories that can warm people's hearts.
Those who know about my creative history will probably furrow their brows and think this is a sick joke. Honestly, I have trouble believing it myself. For when I start typing out words on the keyboard, the stories my brain comes up with are always full of madness and despair.

The truth is, I haven't always been this way. I have often written pieces that didn't have a perfect ending, but by the last chapter the protagonist would still possess a belief that "Although there will be many hardships to come, I still have to hold on".

But ever since I don't know when, I can no longer write works like this.

I have nothing but contempt for the thing men call happiness, and have had to push the characters I poured my heart out to create into the abyss of tragedy.

For all things in the world, if they are just left alone and paid no attention, are bound to advance in a negative direction.

No matter what we do, we can't stop the universe from getting colder, either, and on the same principle. This world is only maintained in existence by a series of logical, common-sense processes; it can never escape the bondage of its physical laws.

Therefore, in order to write a perfect ending for a story you must possess the power to break the chain of cause and effect, invert black and white, and act in complete contradiction to the rules of the universe. Only a heavenly and chaste soul, a soul that resounds with genuine praise for humanity, can save the story; to write a story with a happy ending is a double challenge, to the author's body as well as the mind.

At some point, Gen Urobuchi lost that power. He still hasn't recovered. The "tragedy syndrome" is still continuing within me. Is this a terminal disease? Should I give up on the pure "warrior of love" that I have longed for? Or mount a pallid battle steed and reincarnate into a bearer of the plague... could it be that I can only create pieces that give men courage and hope in my next life? (When I wrote this, I accidentally wrote "courage" as "lingering ghosts". I guess that's what I get for using IME -- Ah, I just wrote "IME" as "hatred"... is there no way out of this for me?)

—Gen Urobuchi, Afterword to Volume 1 of Fate/Zero with a lot of foreshadowing about his next work