Joseph Fiennes Quotes

The true art is being able to take whatever the writer's done, and if it is a bit flimsy or it is a bit rushed or is just box-ticking writing, then the true artist would be able to make that come off the page and sing for an audience or a viewer. I'm still learning how to do that properly.

I get some flak for and some resistance from colleagues for because I'm interested in storytelling. I mean what I like about songwriting is songs used to tell a story.

I think that's why I keep being drawn back to television, because I think it's one of the most creative outlets.

My films are misinterpreted all the time. I don't mind that. Everybody's films are misinterpreted. But there's no malice or stupidity in the people that misinterpret them. You know what you do, but someone else sees it, and they want to talk about it or write about it, and so they misinterpret them.

I love helping someone else tell their story, but I like being the storyteller sometimes.

[My stories were] an excuse for making pictures.

To be a storyteller is to be able to speak truth, to be able to use your imagination, to use the creative gifts that the Creator has given you.

An idea you have might not be original. But by creating a novel out of that idea you can make it original.

My experience of singing, as an actor, was that there's a different creative feeling of freedom. The acting thing is a bit more defined and cerebral. I can see why people would want to cross over. If you have so much freedom on stage then perhaps you want to be confined a bit, and vice versa.

I might tell a story about somebody else, but I don't sit there and do a story about somebody snitching on me selling coke because people know I didn't sell coke. So I just try to keep it real but still try to do it in a creative way.

The book is not the important part. The book is the delivery system. The important part is the story and the talent.

A novel is an impression, not an argument; and there the matter must rest.

A film is not a documentary. And what's wonderful about film is that it's a real provocation for people. I never, ever see film as being an absolute version of the truth.

An artist is an entertainer, number one - a storyteller who takes people someplace, who gives them what they didn't know they wanted.

A novel is like a bow, and the violin that produces the sound is the reader's soul.

By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable tools are his sense and his memory; what happens in his mind is primarily pictures.

TV is very much my first love. I love this world. It's where writers have the most creative control, and I just love that.

What is real for me are the illusions I create with my paintings. Everything else is quicksand.

The true novelist is one who understands the work as a continuous poem, is a myth-maker, and the wonder of the art resides in the endless different ways of telling a story.

The best way to truly understand narrative art is to experience it.

I feel that I am just a storyteller, and whether I am wearing the director hat or the playwright hat, it doesn't matter.

I prefer things that are private, so I love recording and I love making films, as a filmmaker, because it uses every bit of what you have experienced or know, whether it's graphics composition, decorating, psychology, storytelling, or whatever it is. It's a wonderful thing.

This is the role of writers: to turn their tears into a story - and perhaps into a prayer.

I write every day, for most of the day, so it's just about turning into metaphor whatever's going on in my life, in the world, and in my head. Every nightmare, every moment of grief or joy or failure, is a moment I can convert into cash via words. I use everything. Turning life into stories is how I make sense of my experience.

The difference between travel writing as fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy - how sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction.