Ken Loach Quotes

I feel like math and writing are the same thing. You're putting together a lot of complex things to satisfy different requirements. It's got to be aesthetically pleasing; it's got to have subtext; it's got to convey information.

Mark Twain said, 'The right word is to the nearly right word as lightning is to the lightning bug.' Fill your book with lightning.

I doubt Picasso ever painted a picture in an hour, he took his time, looked at every detail and made sure it was perfect.

Work is style, and there is style without thought; not in theory, only in fact. When I take a sentence in my hand, raise it to the light, rub my hand across it, disjoin it, put it back together again with a comma added, raising the pitch in the front part; when I rub the grain of it, comb the fur of it, re-assemble the bones of it, I am making something that carries with it the sound of a voice, the firmness of a hand. Maybe little more.

To me, trying to achieve the balance is when you become good: when you have enough technique to be able to play what is that you want, but also when you can refine what you want to communicate to people. As a younger person, it wasn't something I thought about so much.

There is no lighter burden, nor more agreeable, than a pen.

Without craftsmanship, inspiration is a mere reed shaken in the wind.

You don't know how much artists go through to make it look so easy. It's all in the practice.

I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the powers of observing.

Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.

Songs are not better just because they're emotionally honest. To write a song well, you have to put some work into it and grind it out.

The written word is the basic of everything. Most important, the idea, and after that, the dialogue. You can rehash the dialogue as you go along, it 's disgraceful to have to do this, but now and again you have no choice.

To give a body and a perfect form to one's thought, this - and only this - is to be an artist.

Somebody informed me recently that the key to every art, from writing to gardening to sculpture, is creativity. I beg to differ.

Now I need to take a piece of wood and make it sound like the railroad track, but I also had to make it beautiful and lovable so that a person playing it would think of it in terms of his mistress, a bartender, his wife, a good psychiatrist - whatever.

Experience is definitely the high road once driven. It actually enhances the songwriting and song sourcing process.

The music is the main thing and it's just as easy to write acceptable words.

Technique is the test of sincerity. If a thing isn't worth getting the technique to say, it is of inferior value.

A reading man and woman is a ready man and woman, but a writing man and woman is exact.

If technique is of no interest to a writer, I doubt that the writer is an artist.

I like playing around with the words; I love it when I feel like I've picked the exact right word to describe whatever it is I'm trying to describe.

At the end of the day, I want to be known for my ability to create life from words.

Art is all in the details.

Writing has always had that tactile quality for me. It's a physical experience.

I believe the target of anything in life should be to do it so well that it becomes an art.