Anthony Minghella Quotes

Prowling about the rooms, sitting down, getting up, stirring the fire, looking out the window, teasing my hair, sitting down to write, writing nothing, writing something and tearing it up...

Seven years into writing a novel, I started to lose my mind. My thirty-seventh birthday had just come and gone, the end of 2008 was approaching, and I was constantly aware of how little I had managed to accomplish.

Someone sits at a table or lies on a sofa while staring motionless at a wall or ceiling. Once in a while this person writes down seven lines, only to cross out one of them 15 minutes later, and then another hour passes, during which nothing happens. Who could stand to watch this kind of thing?

Anyone can sit down and write two pages of a novel, then forget about it, and a week later write five pages of a screenplay, then forget about it, and a week later start another novel... etc, etc.

I think the biggest obstacle I still have to overcome is myself, and just kind of struggling every day with what to do with the work and where to go next.

But I still feel I waste a lot of time leaning on my elbow and thinking to myself, 'alright sucker, now what?'

I remember a point in [writing] the story where I said, "This isn't working, I should go and buy something at the supermarket or my wife will kill me." Then I said, "No, I'll go on."

I procrastinate, and I push writing to the last available moment, because I don't like to settle on anything. I guess you can call it indecision or you can call it holding out for inspiration.

I try to write a lot and my process is kind of back and forth. I procrastinate a lot so when I do sit down to write, I'm pretty lazy at it. And it's such a frustrating thing sometimes - writing - when you don't do it all the time, you get that thing in your head that you have nothing to talk about and you can't write songs.

I will probably write an hour a day and spend eight hours a day biting my knuckle and worrying about not writing.

It takes an awful lot of time to not write a book.

I am slow. A sentence often takes an hour to compose before I throw it out. What can you do?

It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write.

What do I do when writing isn't going well? Well, I don't write - which is symptom, cure, and cause. And then sometimes I just tell myself, as I'm writing, "I'll fix it later." And sometimes it's true, I do.

When you're trying to create something and you need to hang out, in not knowing, in all the cracks and spaces where you feel lost, and you need to endure them, and have new ideas come out of that emptiness, well, the Internet is what we do when we feel lost, you know? Like, you go online or you check your email when you don't know what to do next, and so it's not helpful, in that sense.

Writing is?waiting for the word that may not be there until next Tuesday.

To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long periods, if I didn't know that somehow in the past I had written a book, I would have given up.

Writing is like pulling your hair out. You have nothing, and you can't think of anything, but you have to think of something.

Never ask people. Not about your work. Don't you know what you want? How can you stand it, not to know?

I kept thinking there's bound to be something else? I could hear it sometimes, but I couldn't play it.

I'm still afflicted with the malady of research. I don't like what I do, and I paint it out, and paint it out again. I hope this mania will come to an end... I'm like a child at school. The white page must always be evenly written and slap! bang! and there's a blot! I'm still blotting and I'm forty years old.

There are many things I think about that never get to the point of becoming serious. In other words, I try to talk myself out of writing, sometimes for many years, and when I run out of arguments, I write.

You do a draft and you get more notes. You start to get the feeling that this either isn't going to happen or it is going to take a really long time to happen, and I never felt that with this [the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo].

... I had never given much credence to the phenomenon of "writer's block". I was more inclined to think of it as "writer's impatience", and to follow Arthur Koestler's dictum: "Soak; and wait.

I don't look at myself on the outside. Sometimes you feel like you're not really there and need one more [take], because I feel like something is coming out. I don't really know what but I need to get it out.