Nina Simone Quotes

I write by myself initially. That's the way I've always written, just working on pure thought by myself. Then I bring it to the table with whoever I'm collaborating with.

So I use a tape recorder a lot to record ideas.

It's much like writing a screenplay with someone else and that's how we view it, I think.

I carry a small spiral notebook with me at all times and have been doing this for many years. There's a shoe box in my closet filled with these notebooks, each riddled with notes and impressions, ideas, schemes, and soup recipes.

I work very closely with my co-writer, Efthimis Filippou. Ideas either start from him or me, and then the other one develops it, and it's a constant conversation.

I rarely write by myself.

The living together is very important in a way. It's important for writing. It wouldn't be important if we were like just getting other people's numbers together, we'd just have to meet at rehearsals, but writing is something almost completely different.

I tend to write, either myself, or I sometimes write with a co-writer, my friend that lives up the road. It's usually a relatively solitary thing, but I do like coming up with ideas.

When we have a brilliant idea, instead of making others think it is ours, why not let them cook and stir the idea themselves.

In making movies, time is so short-because it is so expensive-that we tend to neglect the place from which the best ideas come, namely that part of ourselves that dreams. The unconscious is our best collaborator.

The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.

...when you collaborate with someone else on something creative, you get to places that you would never get to on your own. The way an idea builds as it careens back and forth between good writers is so unpredictable. Sometimes it depends on people misunderstanding each other, and that's why I don't think there's any such thing as a mistake in the creative process. You never know where it might lead.

For me, collaborating is a marriage of the minds. It's two or more people coming together and making an idea come alive. Using their own creative knowledge or creative spirit to make the best version of an idea. To inspire an idea and to challenge it to be better than just one person's vision for it.

I wake up sometimes with an idea and then I write it down. It's not necessarily easy, but when you focus on something it comes.

I use a computer, but before I begin each new book I keep a notebook. I write down everything that comes to mind during that period before I actually begin. It might take months or weeks. That notebook is my security blanket so that I never have to face a blank screen (or blank page). But I print out often and my best ideas usually come with a pencil in my hand.

If I collaborate with people, ideas...they take interesting turns and twists, and I'm excited for that and that process and excited to see what we come up with.

Always write your ideas down however silly or trivial they might seem. Keep a notebook with you at all times.

Basically I started to jot notes, lots of faxes back and forth to my writer, we faxed ideas throughout the whole first draft, and started all over again.

I write stuff down. I have a chalkboard in the kitchen where I will scrawl stuff down if I have a faint outline of an idea. And I'll go into my office or whatever. But that goes from format to format.

I think getting the rest of the guys in the band to write is important.

Sometimes you give birth to something or you're part of a team that gives birth to an idea, and it grows and has a whole life of its own, and you feel grateful. It's just so humbling.

I carry a notebook with me everywhere. But that's only the first step.

When I write notes in my journal, I'm just trying to scribble down as much as possible. Later on, I decide whether to follow some of those first impressions or whether to abandon them.

I really challenge every actor at the beginning of a process, and I always say, 'I have an idea that I'm going to bring to the table. I hope and expect that you will have an idea and bring it to the table. But the way I really want to work is that together we're going to have a third idea that is better than either of our ideas.'

In our office, we have a whiteboard with all of our ideas and things we want to write on it - great ideas we have that we haven't had the time to get around to yet.