Jenny Zhang Quotes

The biggest challenge for me has been in coping with my perfectionism. I have a stiflingly hard time moving forward in a project if it's not 'just right' all along the way. The trap I so easily fall into is rewriting and rewriting the same scenes over and over to make them perfect, instead of continuing on into the wild unknown of the story.

I somehow sensed when I was a teenager that I wanted to do my own work. I was quite clear that I didn't want to be an interpretative kind of artist. I had an intuition about wanting to create my own form, in one way or another, whatever that would be.

I got songs; I just never release them. I don't know why. A lot of people say I need to put it out. I guess I haven't made it my focus.

There is no such thing as a long piece of work, except one that you dare not start.

You're supposed to be a control freak when you're an artist. That's the whole point of having a vision: Why have one if you're not going to protect it?

My goal was, and still is, to write first, direct my own stuff whenever possible and control my own creative destiny.

This is not a screenplay. I don't do twenty drafts. I'm not going to show this to you until it's published or accepted for publication. You can make whatever suggestions you want, but I probably will ignore them entirely.

Even when the writing seems very frivolous, I'm puritanical. I don't mean my subject matter. It's that I'm almost pathologically incapable of leaving something when I'm not quite happy with it.

I'm not ready to do any compromises for my work.

One thing I know is that I don't want to be a director for hire, making genre films.

I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.

My verses stand gawping a bit. I never get used to this. They've lived here long enough.

Writing for myself and writing for another artist are two very different experiences. When I handle both the story and the art, I have full control. I can endlessly tweak every word and every line.

I don't think writing or co-writing my songs makes me a better singer, but I haven't really got an excuse not to do it as I've got too many opinions!

When writing isn't going well-then the bad thing about being a writer is that I also have the freedom and flexibility to do something badly, and no one else can fix it for me.

I have a horror of the blank page. I simply cannot write on a blank page or screen. Because once I do, I start to fix it, and I never get past the first sentence.

I'm very finicky about when I'm in the right mood to write. So most days, I find some excuse not to do anything.

My films, no one else will do.

I'm not sure why writing for others became harder. Probably a reluctance to give away anything you might conceivably use yourself caused a block. I did it, but it remained hard when it had once been easy.

I don't necessarily love all the collaborations that I've done; the more I work with other people, the more I realize that I want to work with myself.

In my case, the long gaps between my books have got quite a lot to do with lack of confidence. A lot of the time when I'm not writing I start thinking I can't do it.

I want to be a genuine artist who has a say in what I do.

Many artists would want a major label. But, if someone made you big, it doesn't mean they're no longer good enough when you get big. If you want to add, add. But don't get rid of your original team.

I was someone who wanted to be a writer but who wasn't writing. I was someone buying books on writing. I was someone telling people that I was writer. But I was not writing.

Write first, worry later.