Rabih Alameddine Quotes

Sometimes, I think filmmakers grab too much from real life.

I have no imagination; I just steal from life and change the color. Then it's a comic book.

I'm not a novelist, I'm a storyteller. There is no art in what I do, no mystique.

Minor artists borrow, great ones steal.

You'd have to be completely crazy not to be influenced by and take from other artists. It's completely impossible not to.

I'm a happy camper when I'm doing both: writing and art every day, along with a dose of reading and adventures into what else is being done by other artists/writers and poets. Like breathing. I've written poems or fictions to go with a painting. The source for the inspiration of the art often eludes me.

Sure, you always put some of your own experience into a film.

I take stuff because I'm inspired by it.

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.

Everyone steals from something or someone.

Composers shouldn't think too much - it interferes with their plagiarism.

I've always kind of ripped from real life to some degree or at least how I'm feeling in the moment.

So much of what we do as artists is a combination of personal experience and imagination, and how that all creeps into your work is not so linear.

A book comes and says, 'Write me.' My job is to try to serve it to the best of my ability, which is never good enough, but all I can do is listen to it, do what it tells me and collaborate.

Sometimes I'm more inspired by stuff that tells a story and less inspired by stuff that's not a natural extension of what I'm already doing.

I've been ripping the Rolling Stones off with every song I write in some form or another.

The thing that's carried over from my visual-art education into what I do musically is my openness.

To write a book is for all the world like humming a song—be but in tune with yourself, madam, 'tis no matter how high or how low you take it.

I think about art a lot only in two contexts. One is narrative... The other thing that I'm interested in, which is tangential, but not unrelated... All art to me is about problem solving.

People can relate to reading a book for the first time and the world starts to create, even without you prepping for it.

For me,the greater part of writing is daydreaming, dreaming the dream of my story until it hatches out-the writing down of it I always find hard.But I love finishing it,then holding the book in my hand and sharing my dream with my readers.

I try to think about me, as an audience member, and it [inspiration for movies] comes from there.

Writing a film - more precisely, adapting a book into a film - is basically a relentless series of compromises. The skill, the "art," is to make those compromises both artistically valid and essentially your own. . . . It has been said before but is worth reiterating: writing a novel is like swimming in the sea; writing a film is like swimming in the bath.

I learned to separate the story from the writing, probably the most important thing that any storyteller has to learn-that there are a thousand right ways to tell a story, and ten million wrong ones, and you're a lot more likely to find one of the latter than the former your first time through the tale.

Books and movies inspire me, but I do my best to keep my stories as original as possible.