David Brooks Quotes

But no one should have the right to manipulate my films in the first place.

If I had my druthers, I wouldn't have anyone's words in my script but my own, but if you want complete autonomy, just stick to novels.

I am of the firm opinion that no one should tell writers what to do, or what to write, or how to write.

It's not the norm when creators have any protections with regards to creative control. And so it took some time, I think, for the strip to gain enough popularity where I had enough leverage to come in and say, "It has to be done in a certain way or it's not going to be done at all," and then have people willing to put up with that who were ultimately paying for it. You know, for them to be willing to kind of concede those kind of things. It just takes time, you know?

The writer is important only by dint of the territory he colonizes.

You have total control of it, and when you're an actor, you're subject to production design and costumes and directors and studio choices and producer choices, but when you're writing it, you're creating your own little world in your head, peopled with your little characters. No one is in there monkeying with it, at least not at first - though they will. With this and the other projects I'm working on, it'll have to be given away, and it'll have to be someone else's property.

I grew up with a concept of cinema as a directorial thing, meaning the director is allowed to sail the ship. Not a dictatorial thing.

I've done a lot of writing for other people, other projects, and what I tried to do with the music I'm putting out for myself is kind of keep it where I'm doing everything.

It was like a dream come true for me. When you write the book, it's still intimate. It might have been a best-seller but it's still my story, as I wrote it. The moment we or they make a movie, it's not my story anymore. There's a lot of letting go involved in the process.

I love television, and my love for it has made me curious about writing it. It feels like television's moving toward something more novelistic, and that's what I started wanting to do. But I can't say that I'm dying to get notes from a studio. The artistic control that you get as a playwright is worth its weight in gold.

The one thing a writer has to have is a pencil and some paper. That's enough, so long as she knows that she and she alone is in charge of that pencil, and responsible, she and she alone, for what it writes on that paper.

When I've acted, and it's not been something I've written or have had at least a hand in writing, I do think there is a controlling side of me that is frustrated by that. And I actually don't think that it's a bad thing, because if I'm going to be in movies, in large part they're going to be movies that I write.

Developing projects of my own and producing and writing and directing is something that's very interesting to me, but you know, one step at a time and you've got to establish yourself on one side before you really have the power to do something else. That's always the immediate goal.

You can't write ... on the strength of influence. You can only write a good story or a good novel by yourself.

Maybe I'll just write books. I'd like to make another movie, but I don't want to go back and [do] what they want you to do, to make it for a million dollars. I did that. I don't need a lot, but I need what I used to get, and they don't give you that anymore.

I was thinking, "So, I’m Emperor, am I? What nonsense! But at least I'll be able to make people read my books now.

The ‘experimental’ writer, then, is simply following the story’s commands to the best of his human ability. The writer is not the story, the story is the story. See? Sometimes this is very hard to accept and sometimes too easy. On the one hand, there’s the writer who can’t face his fate: that the telling of a story has nothing at all to do with him; on the other hand, there’s the one who faces it too well: that the telling of the story has nothing at all to do with him

Throughout whatever I do, I always just say "Director" first. I am directing the storylines and I'm creating what it is.

This is where I begin to do the writing. I am now going to be the pen and not the paper.

I think it's amazing to have one writer write every episode of a series. It's very rare, I think. You get a voice that continues.

I don't see myself directing things I don't write because, to me, directing was just an extension of the writing process.

No one can help you write. No one can teach you how to write.

There's this message to comedians in particular, that you shouldn't write it, and a television writer should write it. And that's a prevailing conventional wisdom that I think is really wrong. That's not to say that television writers aren't great, but I think that the belief that some comedy writer's going to be able to capture your voice is naive.

I think for any writer, creating and controlling your own property is the ultimate dream.

Even monarchs have need of authors, and fear their pens more than ugly women the painter's pencil.