Alan Menken Quotes

Every scene is on the table to collaborate on, to pick apart, to try a million different ways. Usually, what ends up occurring in the end is something that no single person knew would happen or had planned for.

As a painter you're responsible yourself, 100 percent. In film, you have the editor, the director, the other actors. It has the advantage of not being solitary.

No one ever contributed anything to my designs.

The great fun for me is these collaborators. I'm nothing by myself. Being with these people, whether it's the 'Homeland' cast or stage collaborators, they make you everything you are. They make you come to work. They make you be alive.

There is a lot to be said for collaboration, and it should be seen as just another way to do things as it is in other forms of writing, such as for television, where it is standard practice.

I believe in collaboration. I think that is the most entertaining and effective way to write for me, personally.

Film is a collaborative art form. If you're not being collaborative, you probably shouldn't be working in film. You don't do it on your own. People who understand that, cultivate that, get the best results.

Writing with a partner is, in some ways, an easy but odd process. Two people come into a room and look to each other for motivation. One might not be in the right mood at any given moment. And somehow, you begin; somehow, out of your exchange of thoughts, something engages both of you, and the process of collaboration begins.

I write everything out in longhand in one fast go. And then I throw out the first few and start over again. By the end of the first draft, the whole thing's messy and disgusting and horrible, but you really understand the foundational stuff.

Keep your hands moving. Writing is rewriting.

Composing easy? I find it easy if - big if - the idea is right, if I have the right collaborator, and if my collaborator is in the room. I like my collaborator to be in the room.

Mistakes happen because so many minds work on one film.

We tend to see films as artifacts of one mind. The reality of it is, I think, when you come out here and start working, you have to learn pretty quickly that it's a very collaborative process.

I think that's the beauty of the collaboration with a team. In the end, it never turns out how you imagine, it always is this amalgam of bringing in different perspectives.

I think there's something in collaboration - the fact that you can sit there and bounce ideas off of someone. It definitely matters who the person is, because certain people... The act of collaboration, where you can talk to someone, hang out, get ideas going, there is something in that. That's similar between everyone. But I think every individual collaborator is different, because they have different brains and emotions and ways of working, so it changes. Definitely.

One day, I can come up with 50 content ideas, and I'm like, 'Boom, I want to do this idea, this idea, this idea.' I have a YouTube notebook, and I write them all down. Then other days, I'm like, 'I have no clue what I want to do today.' I rarely have days like that.

Often as a writer, you get your first draft out, and then you look and think, 'Now, what have I got here.' You're really just throwing mud at the wall and then going, 'Oh, there's a pattern there.'

The thing I like to stress about TV is that it's a team exercise. You really can't have too much of an ego.

Novel writing, like so many things in life, is an iterative process. You come at it again and again, working at it like you would a piece of pottery or a stone sculpture, chipping away the parts that don't make sense, smoothing over the rough edges.

When Sonic Youth writes music, we write everything in a very communal way. It doesn't matter who brought something in initially; it all gets transformed by the band.

At the highest level, a discussion can be good sometimes to get everyone back on their toes.

Everything I write in my show is a collaboration with a team.

It's really lonely trying to build something by yourself. It's good to have thought partners to bounce ideas off of.

I work very closely with my co-writer, Efthimis Filippou. Ideas either start from him or me, and then the other one develops it, and it's a constant conversation.

I'm a great reviser. I do these reckless drafts just to get the lay of the land.