W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

One piece of advice I have is: Want something else more than success. Success is a lovely thing, but your desire to say something, your worth, and your identity shouldn’t rely on it, because it’s not guaranteed and it’s not permanent and it’s not sufficient. So work hard, fall in love with the writing — the characters, the story, the words, the themes — and make sure that you are who you are regardless of your life circumstances. That way, when the good things come, they don’t warp you, and when the bad things hit you, you don’t fall apart.

You have to have heart's passion to write a novel.

Singing is about telling a story. When you are onstage, you get to be your own self... When acting, you're someone else.

Olivier said that drama is an affair of the heart, or it's nothing, and he was right.

I guess, taking away all the theatrics or the costuming and the outer layers of what I do, I'm a writer... I write.

Storytelling is my passion, and it rises from a love of reading.

If the character is true, the movie will fall into place. Or at least that's what you hope.

I've just always been very interested in story above all.

We all know that I love writing Gambit.

If you do not hear music in your words, you have put too much thought into your writing and not enough heart.

The best writers are gravitating to that world. What's rewarding also is this: you have a two hour movie, you can't really delve into character that much. In a TV show you can. You can delve into character. You can get into nitty gritty.

As a novelist, I cannot occupy myself with "characters," or at any rate central ones, who lack panache, in one or another sense, who would be incapable of a major action or a major passion, or who have not a touch of the ambiguity, the ultimate unaccountability, the enlarging mistiness of persons "in history." History, as more austerely I now know it, is not romantic. But I am.

It is more important to just be as honest as I can about my characters than to write some really great sentence.

I wanted to make a love story without being nerdy.

Any time a writer thinks he has all the answers to how someone should talk or react or end a scene, it's a spontaneity-killer.

My music is just about story telling. I don't have much to say, and I'm not trying to change anyone's mind. I'm just singing through conviction about what I love and what I care about, starting with the very small.

All stories should have some honesty and truth in them, otherwise you're just playing about.

I write from my imagination, not from what I've read in books or seen on TV or to make money. I wrote from an idea I was passionate about.

I was so in love with books from as early as I remember that it seemed a natural step to want to create them. And so I just wanted to be a writer from a very young age. And I think that the lies were just a natural side effect of me wanting to tell stories and write them down.

I think that's the most important job of a novelist - to bring authority to their writing.

I approach writing stories as a recorder. I think of my role as some kind of reporting device - recording and projecting.

I like telling stories.

A lot of times as writers, you want to come up with the best possible story, and you bend it according to what you want to happen. I think one of the things that I always try to think about is what would really happen in a situation, what feels real.

In the theater, characters have to cut the umbilical cord from the writer and talk in their own voices.

Only a reader can become a writer. Develop a lively intellect and the ability to become interested in anything, no matter how mundane it might seem at first. Look for the story. Develop an eye for detail. Feed your mind and your brain: learn as much as you can about everything you can.