Jennifer McMahon Quotes

I try not to repeat a story. I try not to repeat an emotion. I want it to be all sort of new for the viewers and to challenge myself as a writer, so there's always pressure. What else can you come up with?

One day I had an idea for a movie. Everything came after that.

A lot of things you just stumble into: relationships or ways of putting characters opposite one another that really worked. So then it's not always so much about imitating other people, but imitating yourself, at least in your thinking.

I have to challenge myself, and I have to challenge the reader. We should be weaving and working on new stories and not the same story over and over.

We pulled them [ Bink & Gollie] out of our feeble little brains.

There's no game plan when it comes to thinking up new characters; inspiration can come from anything - from a wig I've seen to an expression I've heard someone use.

I sort of love reading the scripts and going, 'Oh wow, what a great idea. I never would have thought of that.'

I think a badly crafted, great idea for a new film with a ton of spelling mistakes is just 100 times better than a well-crafted stale script.

For me, it would be pointless to write a novel that I knew I could complete within a specific length of time. I could do that only by repeating something I had done before, and I've never wanted to do that.

To have frequent recourse to narrative betrays great want of imagination.

Most of my favourite moments in film have been when I've had an opportunity to say something from scratch, something original, whether I jotted down a few lines or it came out in improvisation.

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.

I think the idea of creating a character from scratch, one that has not been done in a novel or an existing story, is immensely exciting, terrifying and ultimately rewarding.

It's like these ideas, these characters, kind of bubble up inside me, and one day they're not there, and the next day they are there. They're alive, and they're whispering in my head and all that stuff, and I want to write about those things.

With me, writing is 60% imagination, 30% people you know and 10% you don't know where it comes from.

I like coming up with new characters. Whether it's revamping an old character no one likes or just coming up with brand-new stuff, that's kind of what excited me as an artist.

I'm a great believer in gathering together all your obsessions and seeing if you can make a novel out of them.

I just admire people like Woody Allen, who every year writes an original screenplay. It's astonishing. I always wished that I could do that.

What really happened was one day I decided to write a new kind of play.

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.

I've always had an idealistic streak about storytelling in that I believe we owe more to audiences than repeatedly bludgeoning them over the head while stealing their lunch money. We owe them inspiration. That's why I'm more interested now in creating new heroes than hooking up jumper cables to old ones.

Mostly I sat down and said, 'I'm not going to write a boring story.' And that actually, surprisingly, solves most of your problems.

If the novelist isn't surprised by where his book ends up, he or she probably hasn't written anything worth remembering.

I always start from scratch with a character - they're never based on anyone else. You get ideas of what people look like, and I'm a great people watcher. You can draw inspiration from people.

Life would be much easier if I just wrote the same book over and over again. But I'm not interested in doing that.