Quotes About Craft

People have given their lives to this industry to make movies compelling.

I'm a composer like every maestro on this earth.

Isn't composing music akin to film direction?

My identity is based around being a writer. I can't not write. It's a compulsion.

I am concentrating on my acting skills.

I love to choose the right actors. It's kind of a pleasure to work with them and watch them imbue your concepts that you write.

The conclusion I came to was that even if I couldn't sell books, I still liked the process of writing.

Remember, acting is not a business of glamour. It is science, craft and an art. Read about acting; don't do it for the sake of fun. Actors such as Paresh Rawal and Naseeruddin Shah are great examples; they are surviving only because they have read well.

I think Jane Austen builds suspense well in a couple of places, but she squanders it, and she gets to the endgame too quickly. So I will be working on those things.

I have a growing resume, but it's because I'm very selective. There are a lot of actors in my position that are like me: they have an opportunity to make a lot of money early in their career, and they do that, and after that, there's nothing to sustain that. There's no art or interest in your craft from the people that want to see you.

My first job is to write a book that I believe is compelling and deserves the long sustained attention that any novel requires, and to worry about the commerce only late in the game.

Sustaining a narrative in sentences and paragraphs is very different from songwriting. But the dedication to the craft and just the endurance that it takes, you know, to stick with it and believe you can pull it out and make it real and finish it, I learned that a long time ago writing songs.

It doesn't excite me as a writer to write some swearing or sex scenes, because they don't have any emotional content.

I hate homemade sweaters.

My sweet spot as a writer and, especially, as an essayist is sub-1500 words.

People may say that what I do is very clever, but it's not really at all. It's not Swift.

I think, as directors, they may recognize, more than the rest of the body of filmmakers, exactly what you do as a director, because I think sometimes the conception is if the camera isn't swinging around, and it's not pyrotechnic or worthily melodramatic, then the direction is uninvolved.

You have to be completely in the character, and that's so hard to do. That's why, when they call, 'Cut!,' you often feel yourself shift. Unless you're Daniel Day Lewis, who stays in character all the time, there's a switch that happens.

There isn't a switch that I turn on. I'm an actor. This is what I do.

I know there are some actors who won't switch their accents off when they're on set and like to be called by their character's names. That works for them, and that's great.

As an actor, it's your job to switch on and off from the character.

There is nothing called 'switch on-switch-off' in an actor. We are not machines.

I think I'm more sympathetic to writers, to the work and the struggle and the craft of it, than when I was in graduate school at NYU and was very judgmental.

A novelist can never be his own reader, except when he is ridding his manuscript of syntax errors, repetitions, or the occasional superfluous paragraph.