David Milch Quotes

Keep all your personalities out of your work. Forget and forgive.

Unconsciousness of self is not so much unselfishness as it is the mental ability to extinguish all thought of one's self - exactly as one turns out the light.

[When working on a book] I have an almost complete detachment from the world I live in, a sort of armor against distraction. I talk to people, move about, appear on the surface much as usual. But later on I have only a confused memory of what has happened during that period.

If there is a secret to writing, I haven’t found it yet. All I know is you need to sit down, clear your mind, and hang in there.

A journalist also needs to be disciplined, and so do I. I am, essentially, lazy. Without discipline I'd be just a mass of gummy bears on the sofa instead of on book tour with my eighth novel.

I write about two hours a day, and I write in fits and spurts - 45 minutes here, a half-hour there - and when I get stuck, which happens often, I take the dogs for a walk. But during the time when I'm not actually writing, I'm thinking.

The best work I can do is to take myself as much as I can out of it and get it as simple as I can.

The practice mirror is to be used for the correction of faults, not for a love affair, and the figure you watch should not become your dearest friend.

When I'm on set, I do whatever I can to find my focus.

Monks are not expected to speak about themselves; the message is important, not the person.

I can do a book in three months if I spend all day, seven days a week at it and, in fact, I work better that way.

In a strange way, you have to have a certain amount of distance from a thing in order to be able to write about it.

I never, ever drink while writing. Never have from the start, and I'm happy that I never have to. A lot of my stuff is plot-driven and mathematical, and I think you need a clean and sober mind to pin down the logistics of that.

I need a consistency of my moods if there is to be any consistency in my style. I can't attempt to write always in the hollow flux of desperation and incipient terror.

There is an invisible aspect of being a writer; none of it is about you. It's about your work, and that's what it should be.

I have learned in boxing to separate emotion from your job and the time in the ring. When it comes to anything that causes an emotional trigger I try to clear my head.

In the end, you have to just sit down, shut up, and write.

If only simplicity were not the most difficult of all things. It consists of watching objectively the development of any fragment of fantasy.

My training was never to drink after dinner nor before I wrote nor while I was writing.

Writing a book is a bit like going on location for a movie. You're absent from your life, your family, and your friends. You're psychologically gone, so you might as well be physically gone.

Don't get seduced by your own stuff; work hard to keep a blank slate state of mind each time you watch your film.

When I sit down at the typewriter, I write. Someone once asked me if I had a fixed routine before I start, like setting up exercises, sharpening pencils, or having a drink of orange juice. I said, "No, the only thing I do before I start writing is to make sure that I'm close enough to the typewriter to reach the keys."

I think the first thing - if you want to be a writer - the first thing you need to do is write. Which sounds like an obvious piece of advice. But so many people have this feeling they want to be a writer and they love to read but they don't actually write very much. The main part of being a writer, though, is being profoundly alone for hours on end, uninterrupted by email or friends or children or romantic partners and really sinking into the work and writing. That's how I write. That's how writing gets done.

Sometimes I go outside after a long stretch of writing and I'm surprised it's not raining. Or that it's daylight. Or that it's not the middle of winter. I don't know if that level of immersion is normal, but it's now I do things. I like it. It works well for me.

I know exactly what I want to write. I do not write until I do. Usually I write it all down only once. And that goes relatively quickly, since it really depends only on how fast I type.