Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes

If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.

Like so many other nerdy, disaffected young people of that time, I dreamed of becoming an 'artist', i.e., somebody whose adult job was original and creative instead of tedious and dronelike.

Why do people think artists are special? It's just another job.

I think directing and writing are very different jobs. Obviously, directing is a more social and managerial job. The other thing about directing is that it's a very, very pragmatic job, and writing isn't.

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.

I'm not saying that I don't experience people in life as evil, but writing is not a place of alienation; writing is the place where we can try to be human. I think there are some artists whose works are misanthropic. When I see this kind of stuff, I think, they're smart, but I don't need art to tell me people are assholes. I can just go into the streets.

If you have a story that seems worth telling, and you think you can tell it worthily, then the thing for you to do is to tell it, regardless of whether it has to do with sex, sailors or mounted policemen.

When I start writing a poem, I don't think about models or about what anybody else in the world has done.

A good rapper is a good rapper, a good album is a good album. I don't think anyone is inherently good.

I would eventually like to write and star in my own stuff. I think I have a good comedic sense, so I'd like to follow that road. I don't know what the future holds, but whatever I do, I'll commit.

Starting is hard so I really need to give myself permission to do a bad job. I always give myself leave to write total nonsense for as long as I need to release the pressure, because it's really hard to start if you feel like that first sentence you write has to actually mean something.

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

I often tell people to stop being afraid of writing bad poetry, or bad anything. I think that a lot of times, when people claim that they have writer's block, or that they get stuck, it's just because they're scared of writing bad things.

I don't have an idea for a play until after I've finished writing it. I write first, and come up with what it's about later. My technique could be compared to having a large canvas and coming in every day and putting a dot on it somewhere, and after several years - literally - I begin to say, That reminds me of an elephant, so I think I'll make it one.

I think it's always the emotional situations that are more tricky to nail and get into because I don't want to pretend.

I'm not always thinking and working ... I think a leader has to really be a balanced, whole and healthy person personally in order to be the best leader on the job.

Get a day job, make your money from that, and write to please yourself.

I think that perhaps if I had had to slow down the ideas so that I could capture them on paper I might have stifled some of them.

All conflict can be traced back to someone's feelings getting hurt, don't you think?

I think that's more a reflection of the fact I've never been a student of any particular school of writing, or even listening.

I love my job, I love being an actor and stepping into the shoes of different characters and exploring their lives. It's enriched my life extremely. I've learned more about myself and the ways of life through being an actor.

I think I came to film-making through writing. I started to write, and people, teachers, responded to my writing.

Sometimes you write and you find yourself almost wondering how it will turn out. I don't think every writer sort of almost admits that at some stage his books can take on their own kind of life it selves and simply lead away into directions that they're not kind of prepared for.

It's just weird because like when I was writing Cry Baby I like...the only thing that I was thinking about, when writing it, was the concepts and the visuals, and the way that it sounded kind of happened naturally.

It's easier for me to sit with the producers and the writers and I give them my feelings and my thoughts and what I think I feel like singing about and then they go away and write it.