Sydney Pollack Quotes

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

Having imagination it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that if you were unimaginative would take you only a minute.

What has any poet to trust more than the feel of the thing? Theory concerns him only until he picks up his pen, and it begins to concern him again as soon as he lays it down.

I try not to be overly literal. When I'm writing songs, I write down a lot of words, and then I try to simplify it. I like to give people hints or words that make visual pictures for them.

Every time I get a script it's a matter of trying to know what I could do with it. I see colors, imagery. It has to have a smell. It's like falling in love. You can't give a reason why.

Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither.

A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.

I don't outline; I listen to a kind of whisper inside the material.

Once they're on paper, they're gone. I like to do as much with the words, as far as image goes.

What I do is write, and I try to write as closely as I can into what I call 'the mystery.'

I don't know what the secret is when I am writing it - it really is a surprise to me.

I think you sense the metaphorical resonance of what you're writing without analysing it too carefully. That leads you down dead ends. You stop imagining things and start writing towards these themes.

I just let the character speak to me and things appear.

To some extent, I draw on what I see around me; in other places, I imagine what I write.

People have asked me a lot, 'What comes first? The pictures or the story? The story or the picture?' It's hard to describe because often they seem to come at the same time. I'm seeing images while I'm thinking of the story.

The other thing in composition is opening up the unconscious.

My poems always begin with a metaphor, but my way into the metaphor may be a word, an image, even a sound. And I rarely know the nature of the metaphor when I begin to write, but there is an attentiveness that a writer develops, a sudden alertness that is much like the feel of a fish brushing against a hook.

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.

Writing, when it works, one needs to access whatever it is that creates dreams.

...imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic.

If you're actually allowing your creative part to control your writing rather than a more commercial instinct or motive, then you'll find that all sorts of interesting things will bubble up to the surface.

It is very enjoyable, writing a story. You get this idea. It takes hold of you. And then you spend day and night thinking about how to do it. And then you do it. And much later, you think, 'Oh, yes. That's an interesting question.'

Blank paper has always inspired me.

I like it when I can hear directly from the writer: what they're seeing, what they're envisioning, and what their intention is.

A lot of writing is a form of seeing - putting down what you see in terms of action and landscape.