Shane Black Quotes

The only way to get anything out of a writer's brains is to leave him or her alone until he or she is damn well ready to write it down.

I see myself as a first-draft writer, so when I sit down to write something, the first draft is usually pretty close to the end draft. There will be some tweaks along the way, but it's not like I'll go 20 pages and throw it out and start again.

My last page is always latent in my first; but the intervening windings of the way become clear only as I write.

When you sit down to write, write. Don't do anything else except go to the bathroom, and only do that if it absolutely cannot be put off.

Writing with other people is the only way I ever really work. In some ways it's great because it's helpful to someone pull you out of the loop.

Easy reading requires hard writing.

Tomorrow morning the critic will be gone, but the writer will still be there facing the blank page. Nothing matters but that he keep working.

I tended to write the book in these bursts of two or three months at a time. So I would know, or at least feel securely, that for the next few months I was at least going to have a few hours a day.

I think in a lot of ways, writing, when you're really in there, is like being an actress because you're in somebody else's head.

When anything important has to be written ... I think your hand concentrates for you.

Part of my mind is working on how to end the thing while I'm going on. You need at least two brains to write.

It's important to tell the artist's story. It's their song! And it's always more fun to write together with the artist!

I don't have a cellphone or a computer. I deliberately circumscribe my mental life within the periods that I write about, and the power of Perfidia is that it's the result of complete immersion. I was there for the two years that it took me to write that book.

I don't think we [with Kate DiCamillo] intended to write a book about friendship, I think we intended to write a book about two friends.

Sometimes it's easy to have ideas, but somebody has to find a way to do it. Often those responsible for finding a way don't have the idea.

When the artist is truly the servant of the work, the work is better than the artist; Shakespeare knew how to listen to his work, and so he often wrote better than he could write; Bach composed more deeply, more truly than he knew, Rembrandt's brush put more of the human spirit on canvas than Rembrandt could comprehend. When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens.

Writing is not just a job. It helps me to pray. It's a way of being.

I write a lot on airplanes actually because it's completely isolating; there's no one to talk to, there's nothing to do. And then I think a lot of it sort of comes out sitting down with the people I'm co-writing with and talking to them about what I'm going through and what I want to say. It just sort of happens; every song came about in a completely different yet organic way.

Writing in a lot of ways feels more like excavation than construction. It feels like you're uncovering this thing bit by bit, discovering what it is, instead of constructing it upwards.

I started freestyling with friends about eight or nine years ago. I started writing also around the same time, but didn't meet blockhead until about '94. I started making beats not until about '96.

There's no way I can stop writing, it's a form of insanity.

My tongue is prone to lose the way,Not so my pen, for in a letterWe have not better things to say,But surely put them better.

I'll work by myself for years and then I'll think it'll be fun to et one of my friends like Marshall Brickman or Doug McGrath into a room and not be alone for the writing of the thing; to have the pleasure of taking walks and get lunch together; its sort of a fun process and then I do it and then I get back on my own for a while until I feel the need to do it again.

I do like writing songs in a band. When it's rock, it's such a different kind of dynamic, obviously.

Daydreaming had started me on the way; but story writing once I was truly in its grip, took me and shook me awake.