Chiwetel Ejiofor Quotes

When you get to work with people like Ian McKellen or directors like Peter Jackson, you sit and watch.

All I am doing every day is soaking in everything - I'm like a sponge, from all these award-winning directors, writers, and actors - as much as I can.

I'd really love to watch David Lynch work, to be a fly on the wall.

While I don't satisfy my curiosity about the way I work, I'm terribly curious about the way other poets work. But I would think that's true about many of us.

That's what's great about the arts. Everything inspires you, and you get a chance to grow from watching other people and how they do their work.

Inspiration comes from the world around me. I'm an inveterate eavesdropper.

I'm nosey, and I have a great imagination. So it's not necessarily things I have to go through, but it's things people I know or my family is going through, and I hear about it, and I think, 'That sounds like a great song.'

Hollywood's like a warehouse. It's just a place that you go. What's interesting in the warehouse has to do with the creative people.

All the things worth writing about are outside me. I'm a lens, not a source. And even if it's not always a comfortable journey, it's always a stimulating one.

I've been fortunate to work with several actors and directors who I look up to, and learned from each of them.

There are lots of good directors I would like to work with; I want to be inspired and challenged by them.

That's how I make work. Along the way, I take notes, I read about history and popular culture. Sometimes I act out things in the studio. I go back to my mother's hair salon so I can hear three voices going all at once. I pull inspiration from everything.

I miss working with great actors, working with great directors.

I'm a big people watcher and a people talker. The beautiful thing about being an artist and a creative person is that you can get an idea from anywhere, and I'm always on the hunt for them.

My work always comes from the same source - from movement. It doesn't necessarily come from an outside idea, though the source can be something small or large that I've seen, often birds or other animals. The seeing can then provoke the imagining.

When I think about filmmakers and actresses that I have admired my whole life, I've admired their entire body of work.

Something people say about acting is that acting is listening. But I think that writing is listening, too. That you really have to listen to what are they saying and what they're communicating to you. And so, a lot of it is just getting stuff down.

I would love to just keep working with really great directors who really inspire me.

I've been able to work on shows with amazing role models, amazing actors, incredible female filmmakers.

I'm a bit like a sponge. When I'm not writing I absorb life like water. When I write I squeeze the sponge a little - and out comes, not water but ink.

Creativity is a scavenger hunt. It's your obligation to pay attention to clues, to the thing that gives you that little tweak.

"Where do you get your ideas?" That's the one question I'm genuinely sick of being asked, and also genuinely fascinated by. What fascinates me is not that people ask the question, but what kind of answer are they really looking for? Because if I tell them the truth, which is "I make them up," they seem very disappointed. They want to know about the trek I do once a year to the mountain.

I've always appreciated directors but I have a newfound appreciation for them and producers and everyone who does what they do that actors don't see. When you have one job, that's all you care about, that's all you're supposed to focus on. But focusing on so many different things, I was introduced to how hard everyone else works too.

Ideas for songs can come from something as simple as a photograph and letting my imagination run wild on an old photograph that I found, or to a film that I have seen or to just most of the time, just daily walking through life and keeping your eyes open.