Ken Hill Quotes

If you're sitting in a place like Martha's Vineyard, I don't think you're going to write a song about a ski resort.

Places are extremely important when writing a long story because place shapes a character.

Till now I have never shot a scene without taking account of what stands behind the actors because the relationship between people and their surroundings is of prime importance.

I am very interested in place, and the influences of place on characters.

To me, the contemporary novel suffers from a lack of sense of place - or spirit of place, if you will. It's not important to most writers, I must assume, or they try to research a given background on sabbatical. Not for me. I write about places I've lived long before I ever set pen to paper.

Something that has been every important to me in all my projects has been location, the place where they are installed.

I think a setting is hugely important. I look at setting as a character with its own look, sound, history, quirks, goofy temperaments and moods.

Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.

An author knows his landscape best; he can stand around, smell the wind, get a feel for his place.

If you ask me, the place that a story happens is as equal character. It's almost like an ecological viewpoint: These people are living in this piece of land, and in this piece of land in this time this is possible. For me, I almost think location first. It's time first - what year is it - then where are we, and then who is in it.

For my first three books the setting (or place if you will) has always been a given - N.J. and the Dominican Republic and some N.Y.C. - so from one perspective you could say that the place in my work always comes first.

I've always felt writing a song was a bit like going on location. That's true in an almost literal sense. Where you are seeps in somehow.

Where you are defines what you're interested in.

I've written songs everywhere, and I think the place does matter.

I can't write anything if I don't know where it's set, where the events are happening - even if the details of setting are minimal.

A sense of place is very important in writing.

I like to write songs about what's happening, what I see around me and what I hear. Everyday life. Someone may be talking to me and I may take it from that.

Place colors everything; It is the thing by which I find my way in my fiction.

Choosing location is integral to the film: in essence, another character.

I write songs based on things I see in the culture around me.

I'm a firm believer, and some people may disagree, and I'm happy to have a beer with them and talk about it, but I believe that locations are such an integral character to the movie.

... anybody is as their land and air is. Anybody is as the sky is low or high, the air heavy or clear and anybody is as there is wind or no wind there. It is that which makes them and the arts they make and the work they do and the way they eat and the way they drink and the way they learn and everything.

Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else ... Fiction depends for its life on place. Place is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of, What happened? Who's here? Who's coming?

Chicago is many things to many people, and to me, it is a place where you can write.

Being a songwriter is really the base of being an artist, for me.