Sara Sheridan Quotes

Writers often have a 'drunk' that is different than anyone else's. That's why it's so insidious and so damning. First of all, because they can write when they're drinking - or they think they can. A lot of writers will tell me - and this is the latest one I've heard - you drink while you're thinking about what to write, but when you actually write, you sober up.

Writers do well to carefully attend to those moments of inspiration, because chances are that they're writing from a very deep place. The subsequent search that ensues to continually attend to that voice that you hear is what is going to give the story drive.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone.

From an artist's point of view, I always want to work with the writers I admire.

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the powers of observing.

I get intrigued by a first lin and I write to find out why it means something to me. You make discoveries just the way the reader does, so you're simultaneously the writer and the reader.

A writer who isn't writing is asking for trouble.

Creating is a lonely thing in a lot of ways.

There are times when the writers ask us to improvise. Sometimes the animators are inspired by what you do, and sometimes you are inspired by what the animators do.

I don't think that there are very many good writers who don't live without a sense of tension. If they haven't got one immediately available to them, then they usually manage to manufacture it in their private lives.

There is one person who can help solve 'writer's block'. His name is Mr. Johnnie Walker.

Writers to some extent are childish, and it's at the childish level that one really engages with any experience. What really moves you is at the very personal, childish level of the imagination. My business is the imagination, and my imagination is engaged by Asia.

The act of writing surprises me all the time. A miraculous thing happens when you have an idea and you want to convert it into words... and then you start to create a work of art, and that's another miracle, and it remains mysterious to the writer, or to this writer anyway.

I got in touch with the creative process between the age of 14 and 16, mainly because I was alone so much.

An artist is always alone - if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.

Well, certainly I don't think that there are very many good writers who don't live without a sense of tension. If they haven't got one immediately available to them, then they usually manage to manufacture it in their private lives.

I'm just a believer in keeping all of the creative brain cells moving and working even when you're not working because the inevitable loneliness and boring drought in the actor's world, it can eat you alive.

Being lonely is not a bad thing for a writer.

Growing up, I didn't know any writers and felt somewhat isolated.

I think we writers are very superstitious. We don't know why it's working when it's working, so we attach cause and effect.

Writing is, of course, a solitary occupation. But for many writers, myself included, it's through writing that we make certain vital connections.

A writer needs loneliness, and he gets his share of it. He needs love, and he gets shared and also unshared love. He needs friendship. In fact, he needs the universe. To be a writer is, in a sense, to be a day-dreamer - to be living a kind of double life.

Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln never saw a movie, heard a radio or looked at television. They had 'Loneliness' and knew what to do with it. They were not afraid of being lonely because they knew that was when the creative mood in them would work.

Poetry is engendered in solitude, so what better meter for it than the clip of a buckskin horse?