Talulah Riley Quotes

I have a very musical family from my Scottish roots.

I've always been an entertainer all my life; I come from a family of entertainers. I always made, very pretentiously, a comparison with Agatha Christie. Her inspiration was crime, and I'm sure she must have taken courses or read about crime, because it was the basis of her stories. But ultimately, it was her own fantasy.

My father was a legendary copywriter. He wrote 'Timex Takes a Licking and Keeps on Ticking.' He named Earth Day 'Earth Day.' It falls on his birthday, April 22. Earth Day, birthday. So the idea came easily.

I come from a short fiction background, and my mom is a poet, so I've always read poetry; I've always had a lot of different influences both linguistically and musically.

They are just really stupid people in Hollywood. You write them a script, and they say they love it, they absolutely love it. Then they say, 'But doesn't it need a small dog, and an Eskimo, and shouldn't it be set in New Guinea?' And you say, 'But it is a sophisticated romantic comedy set in Paris.'

My dad read 'The Danish Girl' and fell in love with it. He told me, 'You need to do this film.'

I won't lie, I stole a lot of ideas from Giampaolo.

Although my dad's a writer, we grew up in a telly-watching household. I never found him disparaging about television.

I had a lot of notes and fragments and observations that never amounted to anything. After the Wall had gone down, so many people were writing about Berlin, I didn't have the same urgency or feel enough authority.

I think a lot of the way that I try to write my stories come from watching my mom write plays and trying to do that.

Any novel of importance has a purpose. If only the "purpose" be large enough, and not at outs with the passional inspiration.

Culture, when it comes to food, is of course a fancy word for your mom.

I'm Indian-American and I think that when I think of myself as being culturally Indian, it had so much to do with when I lived with my parents and was a kid because they would take me to the Diwali festivals. They would take me to the temple, and they would teach me about all the different holidays.

[My mother ] will write me an email, and it'll be Shanah Tovah. And the next day it'll be something else, Baruch Hashem Adonai. And I - I'm lost half of the time, but that was the world that I grew up in.

I think that sense of unreality inspired me to write the story within the book that [August] Brill tells himself, one of the stories he tells himself.

Occasionally, I'll dream I'm in the factory. That will help me write. Not creatively, but more like a prod. I don't want to go back there.

My dad is a minister and my mum is a worker with the less fortunate and the disabled. They're Nigerian natives. Their first language is Yoruba, and their second language is English. My mum and dad moved to London when they had my eldest sister. They started a life in London as immigrants, and they built up from there. They're no actors in my family, but there are definitely animated black people in my family.

For me, books are music for my mind and my imagination. When I am stuck in something I'm writing, I simply read my way out of being stuck. You can never waste time reading.

Although I'm a Scot, I'd be proud to be called a Scouser.

I remember, like, literally saying - watching some cowboy-and-Indian movie with my mother, and I go, so, if we were back then, we'd be the Indians, right? She goes, yup, that's who we'd be. We wouldn't be those guys in the covered wagons. We'd be the Indians.

I'm not much interested in my own self when I write. I'm interested in what I observe out there, what's going on around me.

I'm half Scottish, half Welsh and I regard red hair as perfectly ordinary. And to set the record straight, contrary to reports, he has never referred to himself as the 'Ginger Ninja'.

Book ideas are like planes, lined up to approach the runway. Some never leave the gate, but others move quickly to the front of the line. It was like that with The Four Purposes. Honestly, I cannot remember the moment I had the idea for the book; perhaps because it emerged like a green shoot emerging from the soil of my subconscious. But it seemed important enough to begin the flow of words that eventually shaped themselves into this new book.

So this is always the key: you have to write the book you love, the book that's alive in your heart. That's the one you have to write.

When I feel that I'm going to write a detective story, I buy a five pound box of chocolates and a ream of paper. When the candy is all gone and the paper all used up, I know that the book is long enough.