Elizabeth Drew Quotes

I don't write material. Funny things happen to me in the course of a day, and I just make notes.

I guess I'm just inspired to tell stories.

I'm a lover of film and storytelling. I believe that I was put on earth to tell stories, and I'm not interested in telling the same stories over and over and over again.

I write in my own journal when something extraordinary or funny happens. And there's some nice imagery in there. I don't think of what to do with it.

I love storytelling. If you strip all the bits away, what you'll find at the center is a storyteller. As I warm to my career and love it more, I have a sense that storytelling is healing, in many ways. You can reach an audience and heal, and by heal, I mean entertain and provoke. It's a wonderful life.

We started gearing our content more to what makes us laugh and stories we wanted to tell, and we had to decide, early on, to not be precious about it.

Everything in life is writable.

Creativity occurs in an act of encounter and is to be understood with this encounter as its center.

I'm not original, but I strive toward it as much as possible. I tried really hard on Weekend Update to do something that I considered original, which was, I tried to cut all cleverness out of the joke.

Even if you're doing something that the studio sends you, or something that's based on a book or story, at the end of it all, you try to make whatever it is your own. This is based on my love of horror movies. Everything is based on something, in some way.

If you just write the kinds of stories you think others will want to read, you'll be competing with cartoonists who are far more enthusiastic for that kind of comic than you are, and they'll kick your ass every time.

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.

If you let other people's vision get between the world and your own, you will achieve that extremely common and worthless thing, a pictorial photograph.

The earliest impetuses for writing, for me, were simply the strange things I happened to notice in my everyday life, stuff I read about in the grocery store tabloids my mom bought, situations that struck me as compelling, anecdotes I'd heard, images, words, metaphors.

They say to just write about what's happening in your backyard because that's where you find the most creativity. It's in the DNA of the show. There's no question.

I was always being creative. I could never have played a defensive role because I would have been forced to destroy the other player's creativity.

The joy is in creating, not maintaining.

I'm more interested in plot than theme, but I hope my values find their way into my stories: kindness, sympathy, effort, and humor!

You learn this great lesson of life: it's not about me. It's just not. The matter of talent-which seemed so important to you when you were young-is not of great importance. We're simply a conduit. We take things out of the air into us and put them in the form of stories. That's pretty much it.

Everything has already been done. every story has been told every scene has been shot. it’s our job to do it one better.

Advice for young people who want to channel their personality into creative work - be authentic.

Let's get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.

In the age of mediocrity and clones, John Stowell's uniqueness and originality are a breath of fresh air. I love playing with him.

One of the reasons I love making movies is because it's an opportunity to share with the world a different way of being or a different way of living or seeing the world. If it's something you've already seen before, if I have too many reference points for it, then it's not exciting for me to make.

A writer does not own words any more than a painter owns colors. So lets dispense with this originality fetish… Look, listen and transcribe and forget about being original.