Quotes About Artistry

There are half a dozen subjects that I return to time and time again, and that doesn't bother me. Because most of my favorite writers do that, to hunt down the same topic or theme from different directions each time.

We make a contract within ourselves as actors or directors or writers about how much of ourselves we let into projects. You can actually figure out before you work on something how much blood you will have to let emotionally.

Writers must... take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of poems.

Don't all writers have a hidden nerve, call it a secret chamber, something irreducibly theirs, which stirs their prose and makes it tick and turn this way or that, and identifies them, like a signature, though it lurks far deeper than their style, or their voice or other telltale antics?

All writers are magpies, right? We're always stealing bits from different places and then weaving them into our little nest.

Peter Gould and Vince Gilligan and the slew of fantastic writers and directors have always geared me towards making a three-dimensional human.

To me, a book is a book. A novel is a novel, and you have hundreds of possibilities, options, and they may all be fine. Charles Dickens or Ingeborg Bachmann, Claude Simon or later writers. The one and only condition is that it has to be good: it has to have quality, substance, atmosphere.

The dilemma felt by science fiction writers will be perceived in other creative endeavors.

I love co-writing. That whole process is a challenge in that good writers are pushing you.

Writers are, for the most part, crazy people. We're like Hephaestus of the forge. We're gnarled. We're curled over. We walk with a limp.

The most thankless job in our film industry is that of lyricists. Next in the list are writers. These two don't get any recognition at all, whereas they have the most important roles in every film today.

Some people are writers and don't ever want to be on camera, some people act and not write - I like writing words for myself to say.

At Sarah Lawrence, I realized that everybody was already what they were going to be. The painters were painting, the writers writing, the dancers dancing. And nobody wore any makeup. The art was uppermost.

I wanted the press to become something of a movement. Not a movement committed to a particular 'ism', but a gathering together of writers with an aesthetic approach to literature and with a lust for excellence.

Why my interest in writers? Well, I'm one, and many of my friends are writers. I know what it's like to write. I'm interested in the creative process. I'm fascinated by the disparity between who we are on the outside, and what we have bubbling away inside us.

On the other hand, I mean, that is what writers have always been supposed to do, was to rely on their own devices and to - I mean, writing is a lonely business.

That has to remain the principal reason for doing it, doesn't it? I know it's possible to write for money, and many very good writers have done so. But for me, it has to remain the principal thing that I actually want to do the writing.

I think that like all writers - and if any writer disagrees with this, then he is not a writer - I write primarily for myself.

There are writers who do start doing the same thing again and again and almost inevitably fall into self-parody.

Writers let themselves be enticed by the language.

I'm always amazed by writers who tell me they plan everything at the beginning. I feel their writing days must be very bland.

I do enjoy working with writers.

I've always seen it as the role of an artist to drag his inside out, give the audience all you've got. Writers, actors, singers, all good artists do the same. It isn't supposed to be easy.

My friends tend to be writers. I think writers and painters are really all the same-we just sit in our rooms.