Cathy Marie Buchanan Quotes

You have to write the story that's at the front of your head. There is no point in trying to write for the market; it won't ring true.

Write what you think is good, is the whole of the law.

I do not waste my time writing pot-boilers: the pot must be boiled, and even my pot au feu has some chunks of fresh meat in it. ...I have no time to boil myself down; and anyhow I could not do so and preserve all the necessary nutriment and the flavoring on which the digestibility depends.

The writers who have nothing to say, are the ones you can buy, the others have too high a price.

The only pressure I feel is to write good books. And to not replicate the previous book. Whether you have a thousand readers or a million readers it doesn't change the pressure. I never feel tempted to give the reader what I think the reader wants.

You look at Michael McDonald and people like that; I think they just tried to write music that was true to themselves. That's our bottom line. Whatever people view us as, I think as long as we try to create good music that will win out in the end.

I don't want to sell my soul to Hollywood - to just make run-of-the-mill stuff.

Mainly, I don't like it when music is made solely to impress people or in order to please business people; it doesn't sound good to me. If you're making music in order to become famous or loved by the masses... that's not what I'm about. When somebody's making music for the wrong reasons, I hear it right away.

Don't write your books for people who won't like them. Give yourself wholly to the kind of book you want to write, and don't try to please readers who like something different.

Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.

When I sit down to write, I don't think, 'OK, what is the next David O. Russell film I can write, or what is Harvey Weinstein going to want to buy?' Or even, 'What are filmgoers going to want.' I try to think, tell a good story. Just do what you do.

Whenever I have tried to write for other people, that's when my writing has failed, when nobody wanted to read it or buy it. But it's only when I've been able to write a story that makes me excited, only then have other people wanted to read it.

No, it's not a very good story - its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.

Admiration from my readers inspire me, and the only 'formula' I believe in towards making a good writer is: 'to thine own self be true!'

You can tell an honest artist from one who's just given all their songs.

If you're writing anything decent, it's in you, it's your spirit coming out. If it's not an expression of how a person genuinely feels, then it's not a good song done with any conviction.

I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.

Don't imitate. Write what you know about, that has to be your goal.

If I knew anything about what people wanted and was popular, I'd still be writing for 'Saturday Night Live'. I can only write what I want, and hopefully people will like it.

I have never written out of a desire to be controversial.

Trying to guess what the (mass) audience wants and then trying to satisfy that is usually a bad recipe for getting something good.

I don't write anything if I'm not agreeable and liking it. I'm not one of these slavers who wads up paper. It comes or it doesn't.

Fiction is the thing I esteem most in my own work; I feel that, even if it's no good, only I could have written those books.

I can only say that I myself wrote always as I wished, without a tremendous desire to find the latest thing possible.

This goes for our songwriting as well as our success as a band - the minute we stopped chasing what we thought people wanted to hear and started writing things that moved us, that's when people started paying attention.