Manuel Puig Quotes

For me, it would be pointless to write a novel that I knew I could complete within a specific length of time. I could do that only by repeating something I had done before, and I've never wanted to do that.

One day I had an idea for a movie. Everything came after that.

All writers are magpies, right? We're always stealing bits from different places and then weaving them into our little nest.

If you know everything, it keeps you from writing. You don't want a story to burn you out instead of surprising you.

A good script can come from anywhere.

Readers would email me and say, 'Please write a novel about so-and-so,' but it has to come from yourself and not so much from your readership.

I have a bad tendency to get rapidly bored with my own material, so rewriting is hard for me. I mean, I already know the story and would rather read something new.

There's no game plan when it comes to thinking up new characters; inspiration can come from anything - from a wig I've seen to an expression I've heard someone use.

The hardest part is not to repeat yourself. I don't really believe my core obsessions are going to change, but you need to look for ways to express them that are different. The main reason for doing that is not to bore yourself, and obviously, I don't want to bore readers.

I sort of love reading the scripts and going, 'Oh wow, what a great idea. I never would have thought of that.'

I prefer writing originals.

I think a badly crafted, great idea for a new film with a ton of spelling mistakes is just 100 times better than a well-crafted stale script.

If you write an original, it's like you went in and dug a well, and you hit oil. But an adaptation, it's like the oil well's on fire, and they bring you in to put the fire out and get it working again - or something like that.

When I'm writing my blog, I think of myself at 13 years old, back in St. Louis, daydreaming about Hollywood.

I didn't know anything about writing a screenplay, but somehow I ended up rewriting a screenplay.

To have frequent recourse to narrative betrays great want of imagination.

When I write something that would have made me laugh as a 10-year-old, or would have scared me or would have excited me, I know I'm onto something.

My instinct is to absolutely recoil when talking about writing in a mechanistic way. Nothing could be dumber than writing a film or TV script based on prescriptions, on other peoples' ideas of what character should be.

I don't write about things that I have the answers to or things that are very close to home. It just wouldn't be any adventure. It wouldn't have any vitality.

I want to work with anyone who's passionate about telling a story. I obviously have a list of people I really love, but it's a really long list.

When my sister and I were very young, my father used to tell us fairy stories that he'd made up. My mother was always telling him that he should write them down, but he would say, 'Well, they've all been done before. There are so many blooming books in the world - why should I write another one?'

I've never been comfortable with the idea of using family and friends in stories. Which is why it takes me longer than something else. Because you make them up out of nothing. Doing that is harder.

With me, writing is 60% imagination, 30% people you know and 10% you don't know where it comes from.

I don't believe that anything's totally invented... If you're completely inventing a story, there wouldn't be an urge to tell it.

I just admire people like Woody Allen, who every year writes an original screenplay. It's astonishing. I always wished that I could do that.