Emma Thompson Quotes

There is no such thing as an "aspiring writer". You are a writer. Period.

Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn't work, throw it away. It's a nice feeling, and you don't want to be cluttered with the corpses of poems and stories which have everything in them except the life they need.

Writing is so hard. Why would you be a writer if you weren't really good at it? If you could be anything else, why would you be a writer?

The whole thrust of theatre is different, just because the writing is so much more respected in a play. Whereas in movies - and having been the writer, I can say from experience - the writer is lower down on the food chain.

Suppose that throughout your childhood you were good with numbers. Other kids used to copy your homework. You figured store discounts faster than your parents. People came to you for help with such things. So you took accounting and eventually became a tax auditor for the IRS. What an embarrassing job, right? You feel you should be writing poetry or doing aviation mechanics or whatever. But then you realize that tax collecting can be a calling too.

If it came back I would be thrilled. I would be delighted to write more songs. I need them now because I want to make an album and I have to depend on other people's music, which I've done for years. But still, it'd be really nice to be able to sprinkle it with my own.

People keep referring to me as a standup, and that just doesn't sit well with me because a lot of my friends are standups and they're brilliant at writing jokes, and I'm not.

The weird thing was that I went to Trump rallies thinking I was going to run into militant, right wing, racist people and mostly I didn't. That should have been a clue to me. The people I talked to were not, on the surface level, crazy. They were quite nice, quite normal, employed, and actually were wealthier than the press at that time would have led us to believe. At that time, the narrative was that these were all working poor but these were not working poor. That should've been a clue to me that this was a little bigger than I thought.

There's too much money and too many nice guys around.

My writing table has seen all my wretchedness, knows all my plans, has overheard all my thoughts.

it is nice that nobody writes as they talk and that the printed language is different from the spoken otherwise you could not lose yourself in books and of course you do you completely do.

I hadn't heard the Gary Cooper thing so I'm not grounded now. I feel pretty good. That's incredibly nice. When I met Robin [Williams] at the read-through, I remember when he came in, I was so nervous meeting him for the first time is incredible because I did actually write him a letter when I was a kid and told him he was my favorite actor.

You can do all manner of underhanded nice things when you have a caustic reputation.

I was always the squarest person in the cool room, and alternatively, sometimes the weirder person at the mainstream table.

You have to know human behaviour … And the quality of your writing is absolutely capped at your understanding of human behaviour. You’ll never write above what you know about people.

To be an author, and an executive producer, and a host, and I don't even know, I mean I actually have a resume now, which is pretty cool.

Sometimes, being happy or being nice can leave me feeling a bit hung out to dry. Especially if everyone else who I'm around is way more guarded.

Have you finished your column for tomorrow's headline?" It was Vee. She came up beside me, jotting notes on the notepad she carried everywhere. "I'm thinking of writing mine on the injustice of seating charts. I got paired with a girl who said she just finished lice treatment this morning.

I improvise whenever I feel it's important, or whenever I think that something's there. It's nice to have a script that's so well-written that I don't have to improvise. I mean, I used to have to re-write whole movies; this is kind of nice.

The flaw is the business plan - digging up and burning way more carbon than physics says we can deal with. So, I suppose it's some kind of mid-point between writing them nice letters asking them to stop and figuring out a way to take down the entire system- which I don't have any idea how to do.

That’s one of the nice things about writing, or any art; if the thing’s real, it just lives.

One nice thing about putting the thing away for a couple of months before looking at it is that you start appreciate your own wit. Of course, this can be carried too far. But it's kind of cool when you crack up a piece of writing, and then realize you wrote it. I recommend this feeling.

My husband has no desire to work with me. He gets paid a lot of money to write giant movies. He's not into humoring me with my projects.

Mel: What was your name again? Rain: Rain. Mel: Oh that's nice. Kind of like bad weather.

I give credence to the worst things somebody writes about me, and if somebody writes something nice, I think they're wrong or false or lying or joking.