Writing Quotes - Page 413

I can't become naked for everybody. It's never going to be possible for the person to write the whole story completely, so I find bits of myself, bits of what I think in some articles. And I don't give lip service to journalists. I never make them feel comfortable. I say, "It's your job to make the story."

When you're playing such brilliant music every day, then the last thing you ever want to do is try to write something of your own that's crude and not as good.

Even if you're an observer of a story that you yourself made up, you're still very much connected to it. You love it and feel it, no less than somebody's who's writing from their direct 'I' or 'me.' I'm just so much more interesting in stories than confessions.

A writer writes. If you want to be a writer, write.

I never claimed to be a low-maintenance gal, but when I'm writing, it's particularly challenging. I lose things constantly: my watch, my glasses, my papers, my mind.

I still think about the letter you asked me to write. It nags at me, even though you're gone and there's no one to give it to anymore. Sometimes I work on it in my head, trying to map out the story you asked me to tell, about everything that happened this past fall and winter. It's all still there, like a movie I can watch when I want to. Which is never.

Language is like a road, it cannot be perceived all at once because it unfolds in time, whether heard or read. This narrative or temporal element has made writing and walking resemble each other.

When I left university I was sure that I was going to be a painter. Then I had a crisis, a revelation. I saw Dolce Vita and my mind was blown by it, by the synthesis. I realised I wanted to be a filmmaker and started making films. I was writing screenplays and couldn't get money because my work was so uncommercial. I got married and started writing fiction. What was wonderful is that it gave me my freedom because no-one can tell me I can't work. Novels have become equally important to me as films. I consider myself a storyteller and passionately engaged in both of those disciplines.

In a way, a lot of my work is in the re-writing once it is cast, as I adapt to the rhythms of how the roles are played out by the actors.

To name the world in your own terms, to tell your own story, is an act of authority and power. When you write, you are saying, in effect, 'I have a voice. I have a story. This is what I have to say.'

There are people all over the world who like to write fan letters in the voice of their pet: 'Hello, my name is Fifi and I'm a labrador and I think you're great. Paw paw!'

We should imitate the great classics. We would miss, and that miss would be our originality.

My work is more driven by the creative word. It's immersed in other writing and printed work, rather than drawn so much from life or past experience.

The agent never receipts his bill, puts his hat on and bows himself out. He stays around forever, not only for as long as you can write anything that anyone will buy, but as long as anyone will buy any portion of any right to anything that you ever did write. He just takes ten per cent of your life.

The perfect detective story cannot be written. The type of mind which can evolve the perfect problem is not the type of mind that can produce the artistic job of writing.

Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of bar-room vernacular, that is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive.

Two very simple rules: A. You don't have to write. B. You can't do anything else The rest comes of itself.

[As a screenwriter] I have a sense of exile from thought, a nostalgia of the quiet room and balanced mind. I am a writer, and there comes a time when that which I write has to belong to me, has to be written alone and in silence, with no one looking over my shoulder, no one telling me a better way to write it. It doesn't have to be great writing, it doesn't even have to be terribly good. It just has to be mine.

I have made three rules of writing for myself that are absolutes: Never take advice. Never show or discuss work in progress. Never answer a critic.

You have to have been in love to write poetry.

I want to write music that will outlive me.

We all are rich and ignore the buried fact of accumulated wisdom.

The faster you blurt, the more swiftly you write, the more honest you are.

You can't learn to write that way - by writing directly for the screen. Wait until you're 30. But in the meantime write 200 short stories. You've got to learn how to write!

It is a lie to write in such way as to be rewarded by fame offered you by some snobbish quasi-literary groups in the intellectual gazettes.