Whit Stillman Quotes

I sort of love reading the scripts and going, 'Oh wow, what a great idea. I never would have thought of that.'

Quite often, little germs of ideas have come from something that I've observed or someone's told me. The process of it becoming fiction is expanding and extending it: stretching the rubber band of reality.

I take in a lot of stuff from real life, movies, television, news and it all gets mixed in my head and somehow turns into a story idea.

I've never dreamed of a story idea. I have such boring dreams.

I'm pretty restless in bed, so I can lie there for a couple of hours and be like, 'Hey, that happened today. What if that happened at a zoo?' I'll jot the idea down. Then I'm like, 'All right, so now that it's a zoo, that penguin's loose,' or, whatever. I usually start with broad ideas.

Being a playwright is like the equivalent of doing a jigsaw puzzle that has 1,500 pieces, and it's a jigsaw of a blue sky. Not a cloud in sight.

At first, I see pictures of a story in my mind. Then creating the story comes from asking questions of myself. I guess you might call it the 'what if - what then' approach to writing and illustration.

To have frequent recourse to narrative betrays great want of imagination.

I do see myself as someone who has a lot of story ideas.

Short stories are fiction's R & D department, and failed or less-than-conclusive experiments are not just to be expected but to be hoped for.

There are many ways to go about a story. And if you give yourself some formal constraints, it just makes the job so much - maybe 'easier' isn't the right word, but because you know your boundaries, you can just play within those boundaries much more, so it's much more fun to do.

My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history.

Especially when I write, I want to get out of people's heads and have them speak and have them get dressed and have them go to work.

Once I'm given an idea for a story I have a million ideas on how it should be illustrated, but I don't have a big shoebox full of unfinished ideas.

I hate thinking about writer's block! I don't have writer's block much, knock on wood, but if I do, I think it's usually because I haven't done enough research and am therefore unable to create a fully realized world.

I don't necessarily start with the beginning of the book. I just start with the part of the story that's most vivid in my imagination and work forward and backward from there.

Each book first begins with a little idea.

Part of a writer's job is just spacing out, looking into the air and imagining things.

No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination.

Sometimes I think I'm a one-trick pony because I'm not very inventive about new ways of telling stories.

How many times can you put together 26 different stories without running out?

I sometimes feel as if ideas for a novel kind of pop up like numbers in a bingo tumbler, and then they're ready to go.

I don't necessarily think that having more money helps make you make a better film. Sometimes having less money is better. You're forced into being more original; you're forced into hearing something versus seeing it.

There is no science in creativity. If you don't give yourself room to fail, you won't innovate.

I think I always have many ideas for books in my head. It's like a forest full of mushrooms. Some are big, some are small.