Paul Beatty Quotes

You write because you have an idea in your mind that feels so genuine, so important, so true. And yet, by the time this idea passes through the different filters of your mind, and into your hand, and onto the page or computer screen - it becomes distorted, and it's been diminished.

It takes me a very, very long time to write a story, to write a piece of fiction, whatever you call the fiction that I write. I just go about it blindly, feeling my way towards what it has to be.

I work best in rhyme and meter. I was most confident of myself in that way.

In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn't know how to write essays.

Most difficult thing in the world, to write a play. Do you know the story of Shaw at the Fabian society? H.G. Welles said "I'm terribly sorry I've missed the last five meetings, I've been terribly busy, I'm engaged in writing a scientific pamphlet on the effects of radioactivity in 1984 and I've produced a novel, and various pieces of science fiction to do, and I've had a bit of personal trouble, and I had my copy to bring out for the newspaper." Shaw leapt up and said, "I've not missed one meeting, and I have written a play!" hardest thing in the world. If it were easy they'd all be at it.

Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do.

There is the first satisfaction of arranging it on a bit of paper; after many, many false tries, false moves, finally you have the sentence you recognize as the one you are looking for.

In the mental disturbance and effort of writing, what sustains you is the certainty that on every page there is something left unsaid.

I don't think I could form my writing into scripts or novels. It's so sporadic. My writing's pretty poor. I often think, "Who's this for?" Sometimes it's impressions of the day or my life, or it's fiction. Sometimes it's about things I want to remember, or I try to write in really awful French.

I don't think there's any essential difference, at least for me, between writing poetry and writing prose.

Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself - it is the occurring which is difficult.

I write poetry anyway and have for years and years. For me, putting fiction and poetry together is like the best of both worlds.

It took me years of attempts and failed drafts before I finally wrote the elegies I needed to write.

Somebody said writing is easy, you just sit down at your typewriter and open a vein. It depends on the book. Some, I have to do quite a lot of research, which I like. Others are much closer to me.

I just finished a novel, and I'm back kind of noodling on the screenplays. Screenplays are tough. I am making music, I'm just not sure what kind of music it is or where it's going.

I was trying to be a writer, and I was kind of getting sidetracked, so I started doing cartoons as a form of expression.

I'm a writer, and the subject is less important than the act of writing itself.

How hard it is to make your thoughts look anything but imbecile fools when you paint them with ink on paper.

When I started writing it was kind of hard getting people to do my stuff. They' say they couldn't do my style.

The process of composition, messing around with paragraphs and trying to make really good prose, is hardwired into my personality.

I find that screenwriting is at best kind of a hackwork in some ways.

I feel like I am in the service of the poem. The poem isn't something I make. The poem is something I serve.

I'm an author who likes assignments, who needs suggestions, ideas I would never have thought of otherwise - then something happens inside my alien head. Other people have to decide whether or not I'm a good writer, but I do have the ability to write in different styles.

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.