Lee Gutkind Quotes

Modern American cinema seems to me superficial. The intention is to understand a certain reality, and the result is nothing but a photographing of that reality.

I think that, as a writer, while it's your job to construct stories, you have to navigate your way through them with your heart.

Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work.

You can write anything you want to,--a six-act blank verse, symbolic tragedy or a vulgar short, short story. Just so that you write it with honesty and gusto, and do not try to make somebody believe that you are smarter than you are. What's the use? You can never be smarter than you are.

I wrote a book called ‘Dancing The Dream’. It was more autobiographical than Moonwalk, which I did with Mrs. Onassis. It wasn’t full of gossip and scandal and all that trash that people write, so I don’t think people paid much attention to it, but it came from my heart. It was essays, thoughts and things that I’ve thought about while on tour

I'm a rapper but I'm a human being.

Often with good sentiments we produce bad literature.

I'm still getting to the good part / the breaking down / learning how to write my story.

You can't be deep without a surface

I have received 16 Grammy nominations and I have no trophies, because I chose to write the harsh realities. I stayed true to myself and I've taken a little beating behind it.

without fiction, either life would be insufficient or the winds from the north would blow too cold.

If I was concerned about my legacy, there’s no way I would ever sit there [and be a reality-show judge]. Once your career becomes about some¬thing other than the music, then that’s what it is. I’ll never make that mistake.

A film should be somewhat personal. I think that whatever you create you have to be true to yourself and create something that feels right to you.

On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth.

People in the land of LaLa look like expensive wax fruit. And they work hard to achieve that look.

It seems like the big difference between good art and so-so art lies somewhere in the art's heart's purpose, the agenda of the consciousness behind the text. It's got something to do with love, with having the discipline to talk out of the part of yourself that can love instead of the part that just wants to be loved.

The more rhymethere isin poetry the more dangerof its tricking the writer into something other than the urge in the beginning.

You write something and there’s no reality to it. You can’t inject it with any kind of reality. You have to be patient and keep going, and then, one day, you can feel something signaling to you from the innermost recesses. Like a little person trapped under the rubble of an earthquake. And very, very, very slowly you find your way toward the little bit of living impulse.

Writing is primarily a sensuous and creative expression of life.

Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or, rather, rearranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him?

I think poetry is the best thing I do. It's certainly the purest. I seem to switch gears without too much trouble. Non-fiction is in many ways the easiest to write.

I have this theory that anything that happens to you that leaves you alive and intact can be used somewhere in your writing.

As my kid gets a little bit older, if I feel like I have a little bit more time on my hands, I'd like to get more into developing ideas and writing things.

The best one can say of modern creative art is that it is just a little less vulgar than reality.

Don't scatter your fire! You are a prose writer: stick to your own tool!