Molly Antopol Quotes

What can we writers learn from lizards, lift from birds? In quickness is truth. The faster you blurt, the more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth deadfalling or tiger-trapping.

Years ago I read an interview with Paula Fox in which she said that in writing, truth is just as important as story. Reading that interview was the first time I really understood that there's no point in trying to impress people with my cleverness when I can just try to write honestly about what matters most to me.

To me, truth is the big thing. Constantly you're writing something and you get to a place where your characters could go this way or that and I just can't lie. The characters have gotta be true to themselves.

Stephen King has inspired me with his humor and honesty, and his admonition that the author's job is to tell the truth.

You want to try and bring a character to life in an honest a way as you possibly can. It doesn't matter whether he's a doctor, an actor, a car salesman or a captain of a starship. If you can bring truth and honesty to that character, then your audience will believe you.

You just have to make sure you're writing about something that's true. It has to be honest and it has to have a real emotion behind it, regardless of where it's coming from.

In my experience, when you're writing, you want the truth, and you don't want to be apologetic in any way. But there is something in writing, the complexity of it, that works against that aim.

Honesty and truth in writing is so important, and I think that YA writing above all is honest, and I think that appeals to anyone of any age.

Be it 120 frames or 24 frames or film or theatre, you're trying to be a fully formed human being and trying to be honest.

Even though I'm an actor, even though I know a little bit about film, I very much view things as an audience member. For me, whether it's TV, film, theater, whatever, it's a big movie, a small movie, whatever it is, I look for the truth in it. I look for the honesty. I just look for if it feels honest and real to me.

As an actor, your main goal is to tell the truth.

I'm pulling out different aspects of my personality in writing each character and, if I'm doing my job well, I'm being true to the situation and true to the character.

When writing about oneself, one must strive to be truthful. Truth is more important than modesty.

I always just get excited about the character. When something rings true for me, then I'm ready to do it.

What reaches an audience is honesty. If you're saying something truthful that's supposed to be a funny line, it's going to be funny. And if it's supposed to be a serious line, it's going to be serious. But, I don't think there's a distinction between how you play drama or comedy, if it's based in the truth.

The thing about any character is that you want to be sincere.

Autobiography is not important. Authenticity is important. The writer must fire herself through the text, be the molten stuff that welds together disparate elements. I believe there is always exposure, vulnerability, in the writing process, which is not to say it is either confessional or memoir. Simply, it is real.

My characters seem real because they are drawn from the realities of my life. I didn't have to research their pain; I just tapped into my own.

Some books make us dream, others bring us face to face with reality, but what matters most to the author is the honesty with which a book is written.

If a writer is true to his characters they will give him his plot. Observations must play second fiddle to integrity.

If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write.

Men should be what they seem; Or those that be not, would they might seem none!.

I feel with this film that as long as we tell Philomena's story and as long as we're true to her, which Jeff and Steve have already done by writing the story... we must not sell her short;. She's a most remarkable woman and all my concern was that we must be absolutely true to her story.

At the end of the day, my sole goal, when I go into any scene, is to try to be as honest as I possibly can, and then everything else is second. The most important thing for me is to just be as honest as I possibly can.

I don't really pity any of my characters. I hold my characters under a harsh fluorescent lamp and ask "Who are you?" I'm not doing their makeup or giving them hairdos. They present themselves to me as they are and then I let them say what they want. Usually they're saying something too honest.