Steven Heighton Quotes

Every time I get a script it's a matter of trying to know what I could do with it. I see colors, imagery. It has to have a smell. It's like falling in love. You can't give a reason why.

I try and create for the audience something that relates to real-life experience.

When I try to understand somebody, create a character, I fall into them. When I think writers are telling me what to think, I get harrumphy.

The materials of the novelist must be real; they must be gathered from the field of humanity by his actual observation.

I'm interested in authentic experience and the essence of that creative place, and where those myths begin and where they become real on any level.

I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.

You have to live what you write, or you have to know it. There are exceptions, like story songs, where you just have to have your facts straight. But I think you don't have to live a hard life to be a good or interesting songwriter.

As a writer of fiction, I spend my days inventing real lives for make-believe people; what I create can only seem real.

How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.

Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I'll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, 'I'd like to write about that.' Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.

I don't believe you just create a character out of thin air, there's always something of yourself you bring.

I can't tell a story just by deciding to tell a story, do it in a didactic way. I need to have my own emotion, to feel, 'Wow, there is something I can discover, I can create.'

A strong experience in the present awakens in the creative writer a memory of an earlier experience (usually belonging to his childhood) from which there now proceeds a wish which finds its fulfilment in the creative work.

... imaginary gardens with real toads in them ... ... if you demand on one hand, the raw material of poetry in all its rawness and that which is on the other hand genuine, then you are interested in poetry.

It's much more interesting for me to think that taking a chunk of experience and mushing it up together with other things that are inventible, remembered from some other time or stolen from other people's stories... and see if I can make it into something that works, an object, a little machine that runs.

I was writing notes, but not composing poems. The Hunter began to develop out of this fragmented process.

What has any poet to trust more than the feel of the thing? Theory concerns him only until he picks up his pen, and it begins to concern him again as soon as he lays it down.

Inspiration is a farce that poets have invented to give themselves importance.

At each moment, a poem might grow into a totally different shape. It is not so much like working in a garden. It is more as if you remade the garden every day.

First of all, writing at best - certainly fiction writing - more and more I think is magic.

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

Let me read you some of my poetry. My poetry just takes me to another level.

You know, artists don't really have all that much experience of life. We make a huge amount out of the small experience that we do have.

All fiction relies on the real world in the sense that we all take in the world through our five senses and we accumulate details, consciously or subconsciously. This accumulation of detail can be drawn on when you write fiction.

I'm not very good at creating worlds. I prefer to write about the world as it is.