Quotes About Material

I just really try to stay focused on what the material is wanting to do. My basic assumption is that no one will ever listen to it anyway. It's fidelity to the material. That's my contract: It's me and the material. And if it connects with other people, I'm thrilled.

Sometimes it feels as if the artist hasn't done the real work of engaging with the material. Film noir can't just play off looks and attitudes. A thriller needs a dose of genuine suspense. It does not have to be literal, but it does have to feel genuine. Otherwise the artist is just leeching off the form.

I find writing a book a slow, intricate process, a kind of obstacle course punctuated with great rewards. But research is always thrilling, and I tend to incorporate newfound material up to the very last minute.

Some spider silks are really strong, but not all of them are. The ones that are really strong can actually rival steel and approach the tensile strength of Kevlar. Thus far, the dragline silk seems to be the strongest.

I've always wanted to work with the best directors. Directors lead you to the best material and thus the best actors.

Let love flow so that it cleanses the world. Then man can live in peace, instead of the state of turmoil he has created through his past ways of life, with all those material interests and earthly ambitions.

A fine but tarnished diamond is always preferable to a piece of glass, no matter how polished.

step out of the forest and onto a road, stepping into Technicolor. Even Ruth laughs. What's a road doing in a place so lost? We kick the dirt of it for a moment, testing its material. "You know where this leads eventually?" I ask her. She raises her brow, and I'm about to say a McDonald's equipped with free Wi-Fi, but that seems mean. I look back into the forest. We both do, but the path we walked is already gone forever.

I respond very well to well-written material and women who have had an effect on society, something tragic or monumental has happened to them.

Books are heavy and dirty and messy and have strong smells and leave your skin dry and dusty.

Research material can turn up anywhere - in a dusty old letter in an archive, a journal or some old photographs you find in a charity shop.

One of my favourite parts of writing is doing the research. It's the door into that magical reading/writing state - the raw material for making the story real.

Having instant feedback on twitter to research material I'm considering is an enormous help.

Archive material is vital to the writer of historical fiction.

Writing the same kind of material is no guarantee you'll be working from the same ethos so that writers from different fields are just as likely to have an understanding of each other's work as someone working in the same genre.

Don't you sometimes find daily life almost unbearably poetic? Minute curiosity is a requirement of the travel writer – as it is of the biographer, novelist and poet. The significance of the trivial is what makes a piece of travel writing human, not the stuntish business of being the first person to paddle the Congo. Out there on the road, I have often found that the most aimless and boring interludes yield, in the long run, the most fertile material.

My manly strength will not allow me to choose a less unyielding material," Matt said. "I have rocks for muscles. You fear my strength.

Time is the inexplicable raw material of everything. With it, all is possible, without it nothing. The supply of time is truly a daily miracle, an affair genuinely astonishing when one examines it.

Material goods consist of useful material things, and of all rights to hold, or use, or derive benefits from material things, or to receive them at a future time.

In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.

I'm just having a wonderful time. It's an interesting thing that I'm very comfortable with this material and I don't know why. Maybe it's because I did MacBeth.

We are odd compounds full of explosive material to which circumstances may at any time apply a spark, with results undreamed of even by those who thought they knew us best.

The first time I ate organic whole-grain bread I swear it tasted like roofing material.

Time is the explicable raw material of everything.