Fran Lebowitz Quotes

I began directing episodes, which was a great light every couple of months. We never short-changed our audience, but it became something that you had to work at rather than something that was a pleasure.

I think any writer is a fool if he doesn't do it for money. There needs to be some kind of incentive in addition to the project. It all goes together. It's fun to sit there and think of characters and get them into action, then be paid for it. I can't believe it when writers tell me 'I don't want to show my work to anybody'.

I love so much what I do that I spend so much time thinking about it, and then I go home, and then I'm thinking about it, so it's nice sometimes when a movie is over, and then the niggling feelings about whether you've did it right or not start to ebb away.

There are whole months at a time when my head is so full of ideas that I wake in the middle of the night and lie in the dark telling myself stories. There are also long, dark nights when I just know I'll never write another word: I'm finished, empty, a husk... Oh dear, yes, twitch, yawn, how I've suffered insomnia for my art.

For me, writing is fun. The day I quit my job and take up writing full time, writing will become just another job. A commercial necessity.

I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said that you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)

The children are being conditioned to think that the purpose of life is to get a good job. You get paid but you don't get satisfaction from your work.

I'm not very comfortable with watching my performances. I don't particularly find a great joy in it. Everything is the process of making it, of getting it, getting the job, saying yes to the job. Those are the joys. Making it is the greatest joy. And then, you have to show the bloody thing. You have to show and tell, be judged. But I don't listen. I don't pay much attention. I hear the rumblings of greatness or the arrows of discontent and harsh words. Then you go, "Oh God. Why?"

I'd hate to be a writer forever and never perform, and I'd hate to perform and not write. I get sad if time has passed and I haven't written or made anything. I'm an artist.

If there’s any trick to doing a job you hate . . . Mrs. Clark says it’s to find a job you hate even more.

Weirdly the writing experience has not really changed that much except it used to be that I was busy because I had to work a couple of jobs to earn money, so I didn't have time to write.

writing is the loneliest job in the world. There's always that frustrating chasm to bridge between the concept and the writing of it. We're a harassed tribe, we writers.

Writing is not just a job. It helps me to pray. It's a way of being.

Writer’s block results from too much head. Cut off your head. Pegasus, poetry, was born of Medusa when her head was cut off. You have to be reckless when writing. Be as crazy as your conscience allows.

If I am just home and writing, I become very strange.

It gives a man character as a poet to have a daily contact with a job. I doubt whether I've lost a thing by leading an exceedingly regular and disciplined life.

People's creativity is very much alive, but when they get paid for their creativity, they often experience that as rather meaningless. Money as the reward for their creative process is very one-dimensional, a tremendous comedown.

I did a load of medicine cabinets a long time ago and I named them after Sex Pistols songs. I suppose I must be getting old if I'm naming work after Philip Larkin poems.

As a producer, I really get to tell stories that I care about in a way that I want to. I get to shape them. I get to choose the collaborators. That's really gratifying as a storyteller. And also, frankly, it's really fun to create jobs for other people.

I got so discouraged, I almost stopped writing. It was my 12-year-old son who changed my mind when he said to me, "Mother, you've been very cross and edgy with us and we notice you haven't been writing. We wish you'd go back to the typewriter. That did a lot of good for my false guilts about spending so much time writing. At that point, I acknowledged that I am a writer and even if I were never published again, that's what I am."

There's no really other way to learn writing than by writing. So accelerate that as much as you can. The more you write, the better you'll get. What also helps, though, is walking away from broken stuff. Not everything's going to work. Killing two years of your life trying to resuscitate a dying novel, I don't know. Why not just write a different one? You'll have more ideas. You can't help having ideas.

Film is very much about sitting around and talking about ideas, and that's the stuff that I love, but I haven't experienced that yet in the television that I've done so far. It makes me long for movies again because, creatively, I always have a much more fulfilling experience there.

The 'creator' and the 'editor' - two halves of the writer whole - should sleep in separate rooms.

I love creating new things. It's kind of my job, it's what I do, and I really have fun with it.

Write a novel if you must, but think of money as an unlikely accident. Get your reward out of writing it, and try to be content with that.