Hugh Leonard Quotes

When you're an author, you're always two people. Jasper the writer is different from Jasper the person at home.

Fight with yourself when you paint, not with the model. A student is one who struggles with himself for order.

Seeing my malevolent face in the mirror, my benevolent soul shrinks back.

I write plays about things that I can't resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.

We have to learn not to feel guilty about letting our imagination browse around, and you know, in writing fiction particularly. But I think, in any kind of writing, we have to learn to allow ourselves to approach it in a contemplative way.

Art is that which comes to a man, and stands between himself and an implacable witness: the work.

Among the mysteries of the creative ego is how the transcendence of what artists do is their own response to the darkness of who they are, and the same personal darkness that is at odds with the art is what propels artists to the light of what they create.

Anytime you work with materials that are deep parts of yourself, you feel revulsion at showing things about yourself that you don't want people to know.

I learned quite early on in life that we are all two people. And one of those people none of us will ever know.

It is almost impossible to reconcile self expression with the creative act.

I should probably be careful admitting this, but sometimes, when my characters are having a disagreement, it's a disagreement I'm having with myself. I can see both sides of the argument.

Talking to other people about a part is not helpful for me. It's such an internal and complicated and still kind of mysterious process.

It's almost schizophrenic who I portray in my music.

Two people live within me. One's a very savvy businessperson; the other's a party girl.

Ultimately, I don't think you can be a character who's completely alien or divorced from your own personality. It's probably true of every writer - it's probably true of every filmmaker, every songwriter - that, ultimately, every character you create is a facet of yourself.

I felt like there were two people inside me. I was trying to be somebody I was not, and I was frustrated that people didn't know who I was.

There are fragments of me in all my characters.

After all a book can be represented as a conversation with one’s demon.

In a writer there must always be two people - the writer and the critic.

The ordinary man puts up a struggle against all that is not himself, whereas it is against himself, in a limited but all-essential field, that the artist has to battle.

There is a song of Gainsbourg that Jane Birkin sang, and the words are beautiful in French. It says, "Le jeu et les moi." It's impossible to translate, because it has a very nice sound. It sounds so lovely in French. So I took that because it was the subject: I and myself and myself and I. Which is, in a way, boring, because it is a contradiction.

I was making films about American society, and it is true that I never felt at home there, except perhaps when my wife and I lived on a farm in the San Fernando Valley. But I always wanted my characters to be more than cyphers for the failings of their world. And I never had to look too hard to find a part of myself in them

Art is a game only if you playat it, a mirror that reflects from the inside out.

I had this whole Slim Shady concept of being two different people, having two different sides of me. One of them I was trying to let go, and I looked at the mirror and smashed it. That was the whole intro of the Slim Shady EP. Slim Shady was coming to haunt me.

When I write, I solemnly visit myself.