Zawe Ashton Quotes

The characters are whole, real people to me that I'm getting to know, and since real people are all flawed, so are my characters, I hope.

With 'Girls'... I feel like there's an impulse to try to make it look better or neater or more perfect, and when I watch theater, television, movies, it's always the imperfection I'm always more attracted to.

Any play that's making a point is less interesting than something that stays with you and suggests something further.

Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise - nobody need read it, but anybody can do it.

Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes.

I don't like to play characters that are too perfect.

I don't like poetry that just slaps violent words on a canvas, as it were.

I love flawed characters, male or female, and I only want to talk about flawed characters, really, in what I do.

I don't write things that are wildly abstractly atonal.

In music, you can use metaphors with ease - if a person doesn't understand the parable, they can still enjoy the melody of the music. If, however, a person reads a book and misses the meaning of its metaphors, this will be extremely disheartening for both the reader as well as the author.

There's such a thing as being a little too perfect - a little too shiny. I know I prefer things that have room to breathe and give you a story, a world, in which you have the room to move around.

You're only reduced to a cliche if you don't humanize a character.

I'm a human, and I'm multidimensional. If I was the perfect form of anything, I'd be boring. If I was a free spirit all the time, I would be boring; I would lack depth. If I was dark and enigmatic all the time, then I would lack relatability.

We've never been squeaky-clean from the jump. We've never been Disney or Sesame Street, you know.

It's not about making it perfect, it's about letting it be real, sometimes raw and flawed, as long as it's true.

You go to a poem to get the mystery - and sometimes you go to get more confused.

On 'City Music', I wanted there to be grit, and I wanted it to be loose, and I wanted there to be mistakes.

Poetry is certainly something more than good sense, but it must be good sense, at all events, just as a palace is more than a house, but it must be a house, at least.

I am rough around the edges, and I am not a polished girl.

I don't like records that are the same from beginning to end, that are too styled and slick. Everything is so designed and airbrushed and Botoxed, it makes us think, 'Oh, everybody's perfect except me. Everything's smooth except me.' But nothing is smooth.

Sir, what is poetry? Why, Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is; but it is not easy to tell what it is.

Thought must be hidden in the verse like nutritional virtue in a fruit.

To me to write well is to battle stereotypes. To write well is to create three-dimensional characters that seem human.

I'm really drawn to the uncompromising realness of natural process: It's unadorned. It's not very pretty.