Larry Gelbart Quotes

Why, why, when one writes, does a sort of shackle bind one's imagination? I become conscious of a deadening mediocrity, perhaps a form of mental cowardice, and I long to break free, to let my imagination take wings. It doesn't - yet.

But I can only write what the muse allows me to write. I cannot choose, I can only do what I am given, and I feel pleased when I feel close to concrete poetry - still.

I think anything I do will have an island feel, but I don't want it to be just that; I don't want to be put in a box.

There are just certain realities about our world and I just happen to be creative within it.

No actor has complete freedom.

It's not that I don't want to do different films. The non-mainstream stuff that I did started to get successful... But for an industry which runs essentially on money, they do put you in a box.

I seem to be constantly confronted by theater professionals who are more or less annoyed by the prospect of structure.

I feel sometimes constrained by the expectation that the work should be solely political. I try to create a type of work that is at the service of my own set of criteria, which have to do with beauty and a type of utopia that in some ways speaks to the culture I'm located in.

An artist should write for himself & not for an audience. If the audience likes it, great. If not, they can keep away.

It is fatal to decide, intellectually, what good poetry is because you are then in honour bound to try to write it, instead of the poems that only you can write.

All worthwhile writing... comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.

One of the things about what . . . I do - writing plays - is that a poll is not taken before you say, Well, I'm going to write this because I think that you're going to like this and therefore you'll buy a ticket for this.

You have to write the book that wants to be written.

It was an interesting thing to do. Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of the pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message; I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions.

Objectifying your own novel while writing it never really helps. Instead, I guess while you're writing you need to think: This is the novel I want to write. And when you're done you need to think: This is what the novel I wanted to write feels like and reads like and looks like. Other people might call it sweeping or small, but it's the book you chose.

As a journalist, I would talk to writers, directors, creative people, and discover that for an awful lot of them, the moment they became successful, that was all they were allowed to do. So you end up talking to the bestselling science-fiction author who wrote a historical-fiction novel that everybody loved, but no one would publish.

I feel like, as a filmmaker, I'm at my strongest when I write the script and when it comes from me, out of whole cloth. My best work has always been self-generated.

In music industry they always want you to write something like the one that was popular. And that's something you kind of have to just - sometimes you just say yes to people, like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure," and then you just write the one you want to write.

The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.

Writing is not "the establishment of a professional reputation" as if one were a doctor or lawyer; it is not properly in the sentence with creation of a family and the purchase of a home.

It is one thing to write as poet and another to write as a historian: the poet can recount or sing about things not as they were, but as they should have been, and the historian must write about them not as they should have been, but as they were, without adding or subtracting anything from the truth.

I don't really wanna think about themes. I wanna just think about the experience of the movie. I feel like, as soon as I reduce it to a theme, once I write that sentence, it won't be that great. I feel like there's more potential for it to mean something interesting if I'm not forcing it to mean something I've already decided.

Grub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, if he’s far down enough (down where I have been and am rising from, I am really saying), he can’t afford self-doubt and he can’t let other people’s opinions, even a father’s, keep him from writing.

I don't know why, but I always feel a kind of necessity to write things that are beyond acceptance, that are too offensive or something. For people to read them and say, Ha-ha-ha, very funny. No, we can't print that.

The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to write; surely one can only write the book that is there to be written.