John Steinbeck Quotes

This is going to sound pretentious and esoteric, but I truly mean it from the bottom of my heart. Acting has always been a spiritual journey for me. The very first project I ever acted on paralleled my experience so perfectly even before I was aware of it.

An actor must interpret life, and in order to do so must be willing to accept all the experiences life has to offer. In fact, he must seek out more of life than life puts at his feet.

All good writing comes out of aloneness.

When I write songs, I write from a lot of perspectives.

As an actor, you need to grow and experience things. What you experience in life is what is going to help you and your art.

The first book is the book you have to write to get back at your parents; the book you always had in you. Once you get that out of your way, you can start writing books.

As an artist, you have the job of working out whatever is given you to work out.

Writers must rely more on the feel of a sentence than on the dictates of a rule book.

My hope is that I'm getting better and wiser. With every book, I have more of myself to pour onto the page.

In every human being there is the artist, and whatever his activity, he has an equal chance with any to express the result of his growth and his contact with life. I don't believe any real artist cares whether what he does is 'art' or not. Who, after all, knows what art is?

My family life, my adoption - it could be related to the songs, but I think the songs are deeper than that. They're not just about this experience.

Writing does not exclude the full life; it demands it.

I begin each book with a challenge to myself.

I have this theory that anything that happens to you that leaves you alive and intact can be used somewhere in your writing.

The finest poetry was first experience.

When you do your first book, you're just like, "This is my work." And it's just this whole other world that you throw yourself into.

I have skipped from style to style from film to film, and I love doing that because it's given me the ability to free myself from the past. Perhaps one of the worst feelings that I can have is the feeling that I'm locked in, like a prisoner of myself, which is something we all feel at some point in our lives. So part of making those stylistic jumps is just to free myself up-to get away from the old or the old Oliver Stone.

When you lose your simplicity, you lose your drama.

You have to sink way down to a level of hopelessness and desperation to find the book that you can write.

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.

I didn't intend to be writing - the writer's life. I was just writing what came to me at the time, but it is a map of how this writer had to break many barriers to find, not a room of her own, but a house of her own.

I always wanted to be a writer since I was around 12 years old and I wrote my first book.

To be honest, I don't know. I started one [book] back in 1982 or '83 when I first retired. But I was only 25 or 26 and not ready to write my memoirs.

I've always wanted to direct and as I grow and I get older and I get older I just want to let that evolve.

If you look at a character as a mountain over there that you have to climb, then I think you've lost 50 percent of the air.