Jim Beaver Quotes

I think what happens to young writers is that they use up every life experience that they have had up to that point for their first novel. Then you have to come up with something for the second novel, but you really don't have anything to say.

I just sort of write the book I feel like writing given the emotional place I am in my life at the time.

By the time I wrote my memoir, 'Men We Reaped,' I had been running from writing it for a long time. When the events in the book were happening, I knew I'd probably write about them one day. I didn't want to. I'd studied fiction, and I was committed to establishing myself as a fiction writer first.

I tend to write from a personal place, and most of the time when I'm writing by myself, it's coming from something I've experienced.

Most things I go through I have to write about.

I'm not sure whether I've been happy. After my last book tour, I sat on my balcony with a cup of tea. I thought: 'You can't rewind the movie. I've spent more than half my life in the Middle East. There have been great moments of horror and depression and loneliness.'

Everything in my life affects my writing. There are no separate parts of my life.

In my new book, 'Binge,' I share essays about everything I've never told my viewers - touching on the best and worst days of my life, some hilarious, some embarrassing, but all extremely personal.

My act has always reflected what's going on in my life.

I always write my music based on what is going on in my life at the time.

What I write is very personal, but not autobiographical. It's more 'thematically personal' - what's up in my life in terms of themes at the moment.

The first record I spent five years writing and it was an amalgamation of all the things that happened in my life from the time I was fifteen to the time I was twenty.

My inspiration comes from my real life experiences.

With writing, I love doing it, but there's that love-hate relationship: You're not having a good run, you've hit a wall; it's frustrating.

I write about the trials and triumphs of contemporary life - and often the readers see themselves between the lines of the story.

Writing, for all that it's harder than nursing ever was, is also more joyous and more fun and a lot less dangerous. And the major themes of my life have become the major themes of my writing, too - so it has all worked out pretty well.

I find that it takes a lot of years of living, and many more of reckoning, to come up with one worthwhile paragraph. And when a deadline looms, prayer doesn't hurt, either.

I think most memoirs, though they purport to be about this particular time or this person you met, are really about the effect that person or time had on you.

Harper Collins gave me a letter of intent saying that they want me to pen down my autobiography. When I was recollecting the incidents of my life for that, I selected only those incidents which were turning points in my life. I staged it instead of writing it.

'Joy' to me is a reflection of the life experiences that I've had throughout the first record and kind of having some time and a hiatus. It's just like all of those experiences that I had during that period - that growing up period.

I am at my worst trying to write about things that overlap with my life.

Every book has got its challenges. You run into a plot point that you can't figure out, or a scene that you struggle to write and have to write 50 times.

I remember that when I got to NYU, everyone was writing scripts. But I was 18 at the time, and when you write a script, so much of it is about what you pull from life, and this sounds sort of cheesy, but I felt like I didn't have enough life experience at that point to write a movie.

I'm always inspired to write, and it's usually my own life experiences that inspire me.

By the time I was 23 or 24 and had written the first manuscript of 'The Final Winter', I knew I wanted to make it a career but didn't know how. It took me a long time to grow into myself, but when my love of writing returned, it did so with an enormous amount of venom. It is now a mainstay in my life.