Peter Greenaway Quotes

The one thing a writer has to have is a pencil and some paper. That's enough, so long as she knows that she and she alone is in charge of that pencil, and responsible, she and she alone, for what it writes on that paper.

On the whole, stories don't write themselves.

I don't see myself directing things I don't write because, to me, directing was just an extension of the writing process.

I never get sick of writing my own stories because there's a certain comfort in knowing you will never run out of material. It's relaxing, actually, to write.

Though The Kite Runner was my first completed novel, I had been writing on and off for most of my life, primarily short stories, and primarily for myself.

I do like the idea of being an auteur in the sense of writing and being in your own stuff.

The one thing that makes writing a better pastime than reading is that you can make things turn out the way you want in the end!

Writing is more important than being a writer.

If I had my druthers, I wouldn't have anyone's words in my script but my own, but if you want complete autonomy, just stick to novels.

Writing is the starting point from which all goodness (and crappiness) flows.

It might be more difficult because you haven't got a book or a prop, but for the most part I like to write unpaid... initially and my own stories.

Personally there is first: imagination; second: the act of writing - and third: the act/act of vocalizing.

I know I'll keep writing poems. That's the constant. I don't know about novels. They're hard. It takes so much concentrated effort. When I'm writing a novel it's pretty much all I can do. I get bored. It takes months. Movies do the same thing. It's all-encompassing. It feels like I'm going to end up writing poems, short stories and screenplays.

Ironically, writing a novel is not a way to sort out your confusion.

Being a writer means taking the leap from listening to saying 'Listen to me'.

I'm writing books. They're still a mix of fact and fiction and will continue to be. I think it's an interesting place to work.

I never thought I could write this much and now that it's coming to an end, I feel sad that I have to stop, sort of the way you feel at the end of a really good book and you know you're going to miss the main character. But in this case, the main character is me! Myself. Joe (formerly JoDan) Bunch. —Joe Bunch

A friend of mine who writes history books said to me that he thought that the two creatures most to be pitied were the spider and the novelist - their lives hanging by a thread spun out of their own guts. But in some ways I think writers of fiction are the creatures most to be envied, because who else besides the spider is allowed to take that fragile thread and weave it into a pattern? What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it to create some semblance of order.

What marks a writer is this: until she - or he, of course - writes down whatever happened, turns it into a story, it hasn't really happened, it hasn't shape, form, reality.

If you're writing on your own, each character is just you. It's just you.

The good thing about writing books is that you can dream while you are awake. If it’s a real dream, you cannot control it. When writing the book, you are awake; you can choose the time, the length, everything. I write for four or five hours in the morning and when the time comes, I stop. I can continue the next day. If it’s a real dream, you can’t do that.

You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it's hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it's better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can't write anybody's book but your own.

Well, I have to write. A lot of people forget that. They think I’m sort of crazy baffoon who can’t make up his mind what to do in life

As far as the writing goes, I started telling stories as soon as I could talk, and started writing them down as soon as I could string words together.

...I can write my own stories and I can write myself in.