Francoise Sagan Quotes

Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals.

My writer friends, and they are legion, do not go around beaming with quiet feelings of contentment. Most of them go around with haunted, abused, surprised looks on their faces, like lab dogs on whom very personal deodorant sprays have been tested.

I've got many, many demons that affect me on many, many levels. A few years ago, I was convinced of that - I thought I truly was possessed by the devil. I remember sitting through the Exorcist a dozen times, saying to myself, 'Yeah, I can relate to that. I really wish I knew why I've done some of the things I've done over the years. I don't know if I'm a medium for some outside source. Whatever it is, frankly, I hope it's not what I think it is - Satan.”

There are parts of me that I keep secret even from myself. I have demons and I'd love to be able to healthily look at the demons and still be a wonderful actor and not feel I need them to create.

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

All of my books come from something that I happen to be working out at a given point in my life. It's kind of self-therapy.

I started writing 'Leaves Of Grass' when my professional life was falling apart somewhat. I just had a movie implode in pre-production. And so I came back licking my wounds to New York, where I live, and started to write a script about a protagonist for whom the exact same thing happened: His life was falling apart.

Every movie changes you. The process of making a film changes you.

How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.

I see myself as an explorer more than a storyteller. A great storyteller, in control of her craft, must be the same person when she finishes telling a story as she was at the start. But I want to be transformed by my filmmaking, by the journey I take.

As Popa penetrates deeper into his life, with book after book, it begins to look like a Universe passing through a Universe. It is one of the most exciting things in modern poetry, to watch this journey being made.

I could not answer the ceaseless inward question-why I thus suffered; now, at the distance of-I will not say how many years, I see it clearly.

I have so much hate that it has turned into love.

The anger is useful too because when things about the world upset you, that is really a fertile feeling to channel into fiction and to put out into books.

You cannot escape what you have to deal with inside yourself. It will never bring good things. It will only bring madness.

It takes a lot of people years to turn a negative into a positive. It takes me, like, an album.

I've tried never to be easily satisfied, and I've been painting like fury now for forty years.... I have a feeling. You paint about as far as your emotions go, and that's about it.

If you're really going to uncover something as an artist, you're going to come into access with parts of your personality and your psyche that are really uncomfortable to face: your own ambition, your own greed, your own avarice, your own jealousies, and anything that would get in the way of the purity of your own artistic voice.

I write the books that I'm compelled to and I definitely learn things about the world when I write them, and I hope that other people get something out of them, enjoy them, see the world differently when they're done.

I was producing things I was acting in, but I had never directed and I felt it was time. I was looking for a piece of material that was about behavior and feelings. When I read Judith Guest's book, I thought, This is it.

I sometimes need to write things which I cannot completely control but which therefore prove that what is in me is stronger than I am.

Which is strange - I've always thought of myself as someone who writes out of difficulty. And I did do that, but I came out on the side of light more often than not.

What began the change was the very writing itself. Let no one lightly set about such a work. Memory, once waked, will play the tyrant.

Anything good that I have written has, at some point during its composition, left me feeling uneasy and afraid. It has seemed, for a moment at least, to put me at risk.

I don't make that decision [what next book will be] until I've read enough to know that I've got something different to say and I know how to say it.