Julia Leigh Quotes

It's an odd mix, the life of a playwright.

I think it was the fact that I liked it so much that made the writing just come out of me automatically.

Speaking for myself, art differs from writing in that I never know what I'm going to paint until I paint it, so it's almost like automatic writing. A writer, on the other hand, can't help but know what he's going to write, because the activity demands a degree of premeditation.

My poems always begin with a metaphor, but my way into the metaphor may be a word, an image, even a sound. And I rarely know the nature of the metaphor when I begin to write, but there is an attentiveness that a writer develops, a sudden alertness that is much like the feel of a fish brushing against a hook.

It was such a paradox for me that the only thing I know how to do is act, but that the first thing I abandoned while writing were the characters.

If you're a writer, you know there are ways in which we don't know what we're doing at all. We're working out mysteries in a sort of poetic realm, and hoping that if a story is honest, if you're dragging the deep truth out of yourself, then something good and profound might come out of it.

I try to begin writing as close to a dreamlike state as I can get.

The bottom line is that I like my first drafts to be blind, unconscious, messy efforts; that's what gets me the best material.

I believe that it's an author's job to cast his imagination into the far spaces. Your life should - and I think it's inescapable that it will - inform your work. I'm all for using anything that can make your art better, but your intuition should be an equal partner.

I only type every third night. I have no plan. My mind is a blank. I sit down. The typewriter gives me things I don't even know I'm working on. It's a free lunch. A free dinner. I don't know how long it is going to continue, but so far there is nothing easier than writing.

I'm not reading what I write when I wrote. It's an unconscious outpouring that's a mess, and it's many, many steps away from anything anyone would want to read. Creating that way seems to generate the most interesting material for me to work with, though.

Whatever part of writing that is subconscious is a thing that no one has access to.

I am very spontaneous when I write; it kind of just comes out. I never think about what I'm going to write about first... it just sort of comes out like word vomit.

I try to not be self-conscious in my writing process. I think it's important to just be in your subconscious mind - at least when you're starting an idea.

It's so hard to do the right thing with a pen and a piece of paper and a set of abstract thoughts.

When you compose, it's like writing. You're like a writer. You just think all the time.

It took time to learn that the hard thing about writing is to let the story write itself, while one sits at the typewriter and does as little thinking as possible. It happened over and over again, and the beginner learned - when you start puzzling over an idea, and slowing down on the keys, the writing gets worse and worse.

I have no control over my writing. I have lots of good intentions, but no control. There's a story that wants to be told.

Writing is always a process of discovery—I never know the end, or even the events on the next page, until they happen. There’s a constant interplay between the imagining and shaping of the story.

You can just start writing, but you're gonna go off on 10 or 12 starts and weird tangents, and yeah you'll have those pages to use later - to gift wrap some fish for your mother - but either way you're gonna have pages.

Literally, I see my writing as transcription - a transcription of what I see, hear, think, live.

A book, at the same time, also has to do with what I call a buzz in the head. It's a certain kind of music that I start hearing. It's the music of the language, but it's also the music of the story. I have to live with that music for a while before I can put any words on the page. I think that's because I have to get my body as much as my mind accustomed to the music of writing that particular book. It really is a mysterious feeling.

If a writer stops observing, he is finished.

A Deed knocks first at Thought And then - it knocks at Will - That is the manufacturing spot.

Writing a book isn’t an easy process nor is it always enjoyable, but it is one of life’s most satisfying achievements.