Quotes About Process

Increasingly, editing means going to lunch. It means editing with a credit card, not with a pencil.

A lot of songs you write are just for exercise - just pencil sharpeners.

I always write in pencil, so I can erase.

While the Pentagon ultimately awards military contracts, there is a reason for the review process. The Senate's subcommittee on Military Construction's approval carries weight.

I don't sit down to write a song, per se.

The outline is 95 percent of the book. Then I sit down and write, and that's the easy part.

There's never a perfect play for me.

I'm not a perfectionist. I don't have enough patience to go over the same details over and over trying to get it perfect.

I write songs. Then, I record them. And, later, maybe I perform them on stage. That's what I do. That's my job. Simple.

The bottom line is that your performance is made in the editing room.

When you go to a show on opening night, or even the second performance, it is at the very beginning of what it will become. By the end of this run, the show will actually be what it is intended to be.

But I like the process of putting a show together and the impact that Edinburgh has on me as a performer.

That's one of the cool things I love about television, is it's able to evolve and able to adapt and the actors and the performers are actually a more integral part of the process. So they're informing not just the characters, but the story.

And being away and not performing for a long time and really connecting with my audience for a long time, I have a great responsibility to myself and to them to do it exactly the way the process was when I was young.

Performing, for me, has always been a very inner process.

When you are working on a script, the story itself is not difficult. You say this would happen and then this, resulting perhaps in this. And the dialogue you make as true as you can.

It can get a little costly if you try and leave it until then to write songs. But you're writing all the time. You're collecting songs. I've had songs that have been collected over a two-year period for my next record.

I think a film should have a gestation period of at least two or three years.

Most people who are writers go through periods when they can't write.

Sometimes in writing you have difficult periods and then other times it just flows.

More than periods where I don't write anything, I have periods where I just write junk and I know I'm writing junk but I can't stop.

I think there have been some periods when the writing almost became a bit of a burden.

I find I often just fall into a stone-like sleep, right in the middle of the day, just sort of clonk. I can't work for extended periods when I'm beginning something. But if I'm at the end of something, I can work on for hours and hours and hours.

I often feel like not writing! Sometimes I overcome it by just sitting there until writing happens. Sometimes I don't write, because books often need periods of percolation.