Quotes About Process

I often find that having an idea in my head prevents me from doing something else. Working is therefore a way of getting rid of an idea.

It's true when they say songwriting is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. In truth, what happens is... songs comes through you.

You talk to the real cops and they say ninety percent of it is paperwork.

I have a few filmmaker friends who are known for shooting super-fast, and they say that you don't have the time to over-think things and how that helps things out creatively.

They say making laws is like making sausages. You shouldn't watch. It's the same for acting, especially for the actor who works unconsciously.

I mean, the people who run Guantanamo, the military, pretty much dismiss complaints by the detainees because they say that they're all created as part of a political process to sort of fake complaints and get public support.

'The Secret Life of Bees' was my first novel, so I had no process. I was flying by the seat of my pants, as they say, trying to understand how I, as a novelist, would work with story.

Most artists are going into the studio for a fixed period of time, and they say that's their album. I can't relate, because I've never made music in that way. I come from a culture of editing and remixing.

All the revision in the world will not save a bad first draft: for the architecture of the thing comes, or fails to come, in the first conception, and revision only affects the detail and ornament, alas!

The thing about grief is that it's a roller coaster - it's up, it's down. The emotions sometimes take over.

I don't work in a straight line. I don't write with an outline. I write where I can see things happen, and then things get glued together.

I write where I can see things happen, and then things get glued together. I do have the final scene, but that really is an epilogue. It's not part of the plot.

That's the great thing about filmmaking: Things happen you don't know are going to happen at the end.

I'm a bit of a thinker so I think a lot, and process a lot, and it always evolves into something different.

I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker, and you have to stop all that to write a novel.

I am a very linear thinker, so I write beginning to end. I write hundreds of pages per book that never make it into print.

Well, I outline fanatically. I am a long thinker and a slow writer, though I am trying to get faster.

Secular thinkers have no more been able to work free of the centuries-old Judeo-Christian culture than Christian theologians were able to work free of their inheritance of classical and pagan thought. The process... has not been the deletion and replacement of religious ideas but rather the assimilation and reinterpretation of religious ideas.

My thinking process starts with my pen.

When I look at acting careers that I really admire, I see that it's been a precise decision-making process for these people. They make decisions based on what they love, and they do only the things that they are passionate about. They play only characters that they can't stop thinking about.

My days, sometimes, it's just about work. I'm not thinking about taking a picture in the studio, and I don't have the time to stop being creative to stop and post on Instagram. That's not a part of my creative process.

Part of any acquisition process is what's loosely called 'due diligence.' Taking both technical and legal forms, it's the snooping around an acquiring company does to make sure it's actually getting what it thinks it is.

No responsible scholar who thinks a sitting president cannot be indicted also thinks an attorney general can try to truncate a process of oversight - by Congress, for example - by 'pre-clearing' the president in advance.

The whole excitement for writing anything is quite intense. And for a day or two, you think you've done everything extremely well. The problems start on the third day, and continues for the rest of your life.