Charles Pollock Quotes

You know, most good playwrights write seven good plays and then something happens and after that they're crap.

I go in and out of season. I won't write for months, and then all of a sudden, I'll write like I've got a fever.

I never get writer's block, but I do have days where I crawl under the duvet.

The thing I worry about is, what happens when your talent flees? Because you see that with writers sometimes: they start writing these awful books. And there's something sort of horrifying about it.

Like anything else that happens on its own, the act of writing is beyond currency. Money is great stuff to have, but when it comes to the act of creation, the best thing is not to think of money too much. It constipates the whole process.

I figure that that has a ten year cycle. At the end of that ten years, I began to get worried that I would run into what is known as the writer's block, the feeling of not being able to do these things.

Usually, I create tunes that are fragmented. I think the biggest obstacle for people with their creativity is that they feel they have to sit down and create this finished, polished product.

I don't listen to anything when I'm writing. I need total quiet, which is astounding, given that I spent years working for a newspaper and having to write features surrounded by ringing phones and people shouting.

The great composer does not set to work because he is inspired, but becomes inspired because he is working.

I go through cycles with my writing. I have cycles where I'm up all night and lose track of time, and then I go for months without a thing to write about. My song 'So Good, So Right' came to me while I was washing dishes after a dinner party.

When I finished a song that I thought was good, I thought, I don't know where that came from, so I have no idea if I can do that again. I'm talking like, a hundred and fifty songs down the line. I still feel that.

When you're a creative person, there are just times when you're not listening. You know, I could be looking right at you and thinking about something else.

Inevitably any series that goes on too long will reach a point where it starts struggling for ideas, so I've always been really aware of getting out while the going's good.

I'm sharpest early, and though I can rewrite any time, day or night, I'm useless after noon when it comes to writing first draft.

I suppose all writers worry about the well running dry.

I always thought writer's block was something that prats used as an easy excuse for not doing any work.

I'm not very prolific. I'm not good at sitting down as an artist and saying 'Okay, I need to put in my four hours today.'

I believe that writers run out of material, I really do. I believe very strongly in the fact that when the natural time is up, writers actually do run out of material. To me it's black and white. When there's a song there's a song, when there's not there's not.

Probably not much of a song left in me, you know, if any, because I've written so many, some 250 songs or 300 or whatever it is.

There are whole months at a time when my head is so full of ideas that I wake in the middle of the night and lie in the dark telling myself stories. There are also long, dark nights when I just know I'll never write another word: I'm finished, empty, a husk... Oh dear, yes, twitch, yawn, how I've suffered insomnia for my art.

I used to love Woody Allen but feel he's become a hack as a director. 'Bullets Over Broadway' is the only film of his I've enjoyed in the last 10 years.

A lot of my writer friends - some of whom are brilliant - work when the Muse calls them, for lack of a better description. You know, days of nothing, then this creative burst where they write for 36 hours straight fueled by caffeine and idealism.

Any working composer or painter or sculptor will tell you that inspiration comes at the eighth hour of labour rather than as a bolt out of the blue. We have to get our vanities and our preconceptions out of the way and do the work in the time allotted.

At some point in the idea process, I simply wear myself down and force myself to choose. But here's the thing: Once I do choose, suddenly all the other possibilities wither and die, and thus I never have a backlog of well-formed ideas waiting for me when my latest book gets finished.

Whenever I finish a movie, I usually go through a period where I think I'll never have another idea. And then, somehow, you get another idea.