Gail Godwin Quotes

I always knew that I could go deep. How deep? I don't know. But it always seems that with each character I take on, I'm challenged to go deeper than the last time, and then again deeper than the last time. This is the deepest I've ever been asked to dive. And to see how deep I actually went for this, and that I wasn't afraid to go there in order to give Tyler exactly what he envisioned for the character, which was pretty deep, that's what I discovered about myself.

I think it's natural for an artist to explore as they evolve.

An artist is an explorer. He has to begin by self-discovery and by observation of his own procedure. After that he must not feel under any constraint.

Every work coming from the creator is about getting the demons out, and each character in those stories had a different personal crisis to get through.

Self-discovery in songwriting, bringing something forth that's instructive to yourself - some of the best songs that you will ever write are the ones where you didn't have to think about any of that stuff, but nonetheless that's what's happening in the song.

I'm writing a book and working on my one-woman show, Learning To Be Human.

I find myself really feeling like it's possible that maybe the greater contribution I'm going to be able to make through this next phase of my life might be as a writer writing wonderful parts for women, or even writing wonderful parts for myself, you know?

What I write is very personal, but not autobiographical. It's more 'thematically personal' - what's up in my life in terms of themes at the moment.

Whenever I'm writing a book, small details from my life always creep in.

The way I like to work is to attach personal experiences to what I'm doing, so it helps tremendously if I can write my own play under what the writer has written.

I love acting because it's empowering. It empowers me.

A writer needs a life of introspection.

I've always relied a lot on landscape in my books, the atmosphere of a particular place, as well as a fair amount of external action. While writing 'Chance,' it occurred to me that this is the most internal book I've ever written. So much of the action takes place in Chance's head.

I don't investigate things by writing about them, but let them build up inside of me.

Doing acting opened up other creative outlets; it made me feel freer as an artist.

Writing a novel is an act of self-annihilation as much as self-discovery. You can kill whole appetites and flood whole depths while plumbing them, but if you are serious about it you also get to put something into the world that wasn't quite there before.

Writing is far too hard work to say what someone else wants me to. Serving it as a craft, using it as a way of growing in my own understanding, seems to me to be a beautiful way to live. And if that product is shareable with other people, so much the better.

As an actor, you express certain things because they need to be expressed, and then you don't really feel a need to do it again. I want to feel something else, you know?

Filmmaking is incredible introspective. It forces you to sort of examine yourself in new ways.

No, I feel like my personality probably influenced the character, more than the character influenced me.

The art of transformation is a very important thing to me, and I always believe I can say something more truthful through characters that are further away from me.

My favourite genre lies inside myself, and as I follow my favourite stories, characters and images, it sums up to a certain genre. So at times even I have to try to guess which genre a film will be after I've made it.

I never write my stories as a wake-up call as such. I simply explore the kinds of situations that I find personally challenging by placing characters into situations that challenge them in similar ways.

Any characters that make me think, 'I don't know if I can do this,' are the ones I most want to do. I don't want to do the same thing over and over.

I look for roles that allow me to immerse in different worlds, immerse in worlds that are different from mine. Then, when you finish a film, you're a different person. I look for that. I look to be impacted, to be transformed, changed by my roles. That's why I do this.