F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

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

In writing fiction, I can be free. I can use my life. The raw material is my experiences.

It's more like can I build a group of characters and can I tell some universal truths that feel real and aren't formulaic in the spirit of filmmakers gone by who've told American stories that were personal and universal as well.

The prime goal of an author is the same as a musician, which is to emotionally connect with the reader in some way or another.

Something about your life always makes its way into your stories. That's just the nature of the beast.

Well, everything surprises me about the writing process because illustrating comes much more naturally to me than writing does.

I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.

The idea that an author can extricate her or his own ongoing life experience from the tale being written is a conceit of very little worth.

Writing has always been an interest of mine, and 'The Language of Flowers' combined my experience with foster care with something I've always wanted to do.

I'm still writing from personal experiences, which is what people connected with in the first place.

Filmmaking is essentially about entertainment, but it's amazing to realize that it has this other muscle that could actually help. Do you know what I mean? People permit entertainment to wash over them, but every once and a while, entertainment - and this is entertaining - also galvanizes something else and that would be a really good thing to have happen in this case.

Writing songs is no different than explaining to somebody what you dreamed last night: No one ever gives you crap for what you dreamed last night. "I was laying in my bed, and all of a sudden a stallion jumped on my bed and the next thing I know I was in Mars but it looked like my kitchen"... That's kind of what I do with my songs, write them in a dream-like manner. It's up to people to swallow it however they want.

Even when I think of writing fiction, it's being kind of a liar, a storyteller, a weaver, and there's that sense of how much of this is your life. The story is a way you unravel your life from behind a mask.

We write from life and call it literature, and literature lives because we are in it.

There's a powerful magic about being a writer that I still marvel at.

In America, where writers are preoccupied with the craft of writing, I always try to introduce this concept of the badly written good story. Turning the hierarchy around and putting passion on top and not craft, because when you just focus on craft, you can write something that is very sterile.

An artist is an entertainer, number one - a storyteller who takes people someplace, who gives them what they didn't know they wanted.

I'm much more into someone who is telling stories than somebody who is writing a record about their breakup. It's just more interesting for me.

The whole idea of interviews is in itself absurd - one cannot answer deep questions about what one's life was like - one writes novels about it.

…[Thomas Wolfe] says that we are the sum of all the moments of our lives, and that, uh, anybody who sits down to write is gonna use the clay of their own life, that you can’t avoid that.

When I was painting, I was painting stories I was telling myself. When I look back at it, moving to writing was a very natural progression for me.

As an actress, you're living something through the duration of the play and its geography. I've always seen writing the same way. It's like somehow I'm moving through the terrain of the book as a performer.

Going back and forth between wanting to be respected artistically and wanting to move people is its own challenge.

- I don't want to be a writer so I can write about my life. I want to be a writer to escape from it. + Then you shouldn't be a writer.

Most books about writing are filled with bullshit. Fiction writers, present company included, don’t understand very much about what they do—not why it works when it’s good, not why it doesn’t when it’s bad.