Rian Johnson Quotes

The best ideas are those that really affect me emotionally - those are the ones you never forget. You think to yourself, 'I want to write that book', for years; those are the ideas that I love to work with, and 'The Bone Garden' was one of them.

Music actually inspires me a lot. I listen to a lot of music, and often I find that if I can associate mentally a song or a piece of music with a particular character or scene, it helps me get back into the head of that character.

I think my characters with my fingers, I think my characters with my guts. But when I say I think them, that is what I do, I feel them with the sympathetic neurons and I work out with my brain what it is that I am trying to write about, or I can't do it.

My most successful books, the ones that I feel the strongest about, are the ones that started with a premise that for me was deeply emotional.

I wrote 'Black Deutschland' very quickly one summer, probably because I had a lot of it in pieces and fragments sitting around over the years as false starts or notes.

In the end, you write the book that grabs you by the throat and demands to be written.

I find that I end up liking songs if I really have an idea of something I wat to write about-some problem in my life or something I want to work through; if I don't have something like that at the root of the song, then I think I end up not caring about it as much. I gravitate towards some kind of concept or idea or situation that I want to write about. Very often I have to write, rewrite and come at it from an opposite angle...and I end up writing the opposite song that I thought I was going to write.

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.'

Everything can be grist for the muse. Sometimes, writers draw on personal experiences. 'Ghoul' was just that.

I throw everything I have into whatever story I'm writing - and so there's something immensely gratifying about finishing one piece and then starting fresh with a new setting, time period and cast of characters, getting to see the world through a completely different lens each time.

Most everything that happens to me in any significant sense finds its way into my fiction.

I write poetry anyway and have for years and years. For me, putting fiction and poetry together is like the best of both worlds.

If I think back on the books to which I have devoted my entire life, I am most surprised by those moments when I have felt as if the sentences, dreams, and pages that have made me so ecstatically happy have not come from my own imagination - that another power has found them and generously presented them to me.

I cannot live or write without music. It stimulates the normally dormant parts of my brain that come in handy when constructing fiction.

I love writing. It's one of my favorite jobs. Of the things I get to do, I love sitting in a room and coming up with ideas, and I love going home and pounding them out.

I always have a book that I use that somehow inspires my novels.

Every movie has its uniqueness. You just do your best and go with it.

The first book you write because of the way it makes you feel. The second one you can't help but wonder how it's going to make the reader feel.

My point was that it's hard to make good films, but I'm not under any illusion that you do all the time.

I think writing is the most underrated thing in Hollywood.

The way I like to work is to attach personal experiences to what I'm doing, so it helps tremendously if I can write my own play under what the writer has written.

There is always going to be a little bit of me in each character.

Writing is never, ever easy but I wake up every morning grateful for the gift of being able to do this.

I need some kind of emotional stake in it to write my lyrics, assuming that place. It might just be an emotion I understand but am not currently experiencing necessarily.

Writing is a funny thing. It's not like you're working on a schedule. It comes in fits and starts.