Phyllis Smith Quotes

A good novelist pays attention to his characters. A good biographer pays attention to the documents before her. A good critic pays close attention to the thing she's brought to evaluate.

I think that one thing about teaching is you're trying to communicate your thoughts about a work to a group of people who may or may not share that sentiment. This has forced me to become a lot more articulate about what I respond to and what I don't respond to in fiction.

Instinct is the gift of experience. The first question you have to ask yourself is, 'On what basis am I making a judgment?' ... If you have no experience, then your instincts aren't any good.

Character is always my driving force. And to tell a good story and to provide an entertaining read.

Fiction is a particular kind of rhetoric, a way of thinking that I think can be useful in your life. It asks you to image the world through someone else's eyes, and it allows you to try to empathize with situations that you haven't actually experienced.

True scholarship consists in knowing not what things exist, but what they mean; it is not memory but judgment.

Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experience.

A literary critic is someone who can't write, but who loves to show he would have been a wonderful writer if only he could!

Actually, no, but I am close to the people who are working on Chicken Little, and I'm very close to the people over at Pixar. I mean, as far as stories are concerned, almost everything we have could be told that way.

The analysis of concepts is for the understanding nothing more than what the magnifying glass is for sight.

I've done enough of this that I can tell early on if it's going in the wrong direction or not.

I think that the mark of a great book is that it will meet you wherever you're at and you'll feel and experience something new and different each time you read it.

I was an English major, so I love discussing possibilities and alternate theories.

In a fire, you have to be thoughtful; you have to have a certain kind of intuitive smarts that the veterans have. I'm not there yet, despite the Stanford degree.

You write about what you know.

Coaches give you too much information. I've been allowed to develop that intuitive ability in my career and lifetime.

Sometimes I hear a voice - sometimes it's the voice of someone I know. And sometimes that leads to a character, which leads to a story.

Choosing to write a play is some kind of surrender. I don't make an outline. I sit and work, and suddenly the door opens, and out it comes.

I've always been a believer in research. It's great to have an instinctual human reaction to a character, too, of course, but it has to be countered with knowledge and understanding.

I tell stories. That's what I do. I've always told stories.

The heart of the theater is the play itself, how it dramatizes life to make it meaningful entertainment. To achieve depth and universality, the playwright must subject himself to intense critique, to know human character and behavior, and finally to construct art from the most mundane of human experience.

When I get moved to write a story, I don't question the story. I dive right in, and I try to ignore the voices that are chattering away at me: 'You can't do that', 'You shouldn't do that'. I just sort of leap and take a chance and go for it.

I've been around a while. I kinda know these things.

The more extensive a man's knowledge of what has been done, the greater will be his power of knowing what to do.

If I like the story and it's well written, and it's a character I want to play and they'll pay me, then I decide to do it.