Jean de la Bruyere Quotes

No man was ever eloquent by trying to be eloquent, but only by being so.

If you are writing the clearest, truest words you can find and doing the best you can to understand and communicate, this will shine on paper like its own little lighthouse. Lighthouses dont go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.

I attribute my good fortune to the simple fact that I have always tried to write straight from my own heart to the hearts of others.

Don't try to write anything you can't feel - it will be a failure - 'echoes nothing worth

The true writer must write not the acceptable but the true.

If I'm not passionate about it, I can't write it. I can't fake it.

When you have the goods, you don't need to dress up what you're writing.

All good writers speak in honest voices and tell the truth.

In the learned journal, in the influential newspaper, I discern no form; only some irresponsible shadow; oftener some monied corporation, or some dangler, who hopes, in the mask and robes of his paragraph, to pass for somebody. But through every clause and part of speech of the right book I meet the eyes of the most determined men; his force and terror inundate every word: the commas and dashes are alive; so that the writing is athletic and nimble,--can go far and live long.

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.

It is terrible to die of thirst in the ocean. Do you have to salt your truth so heavily that it does not even-quench thirst any more?

Avoid stock expressions (like the plague, as William Safire used to say) and repetitions. Don't say that as a boy your grandmother used to read to you, unless at that stage of her life she really was a boy, in which case you have probably thrown away a better intro. If something is worth hearing or listening to, it's very probably worth reading. So, this above all: Find your own voice.

When you write you in a way write out of what you think of as your best self, the part of you that is lacking in foibles and weaknesses and egotism and vanities and so on. You're just trying to really say something as truthful as you can out of the best that you have in you.

It doesn't take long to write things of which you know nothing. When you write of actual things, it takes longer, because you have to live them first.

Raw and honest is what I go for [in my style of shooting]. I am looking for your inner beauty. The outside tells a story... But together is raw honesty.

I think I'm trying to write truthfully about life, and naturalism, or the way people normally talk in movies, is a convention. It's not the way people talk in life at all.

A word in earnest is as good as a speech.

Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don't worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent.

I write as straight as I can, just as I walk as straight as I can, because that is the best way to get there.

The difficulty is not to write, but to write what you mean.

It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader. If you do not believe in the characters or the story you are doing at that moment with all your mind, strength, and will, if you don't feel joy and excitement while writing it, then you're wasting good white paper, even if it sells, because there are other ways in which a writer can bring in the rent money besides writing bad or phony stories.

Autobiography is not important. Authenticity is important. The writer must fire herself through the text, be the molten stuff that welds together disparate elements. I believe there is always exposure, vulnerability, in the writing process, which is not to say it is either confessional or memoir. Simply, it is real.

I believe verbal felicity is the fruit of ardor, of diligence, and of refusing to be false.

Honesty is one part of eloquence. We persuade others by being in earnest ourselves.

In general, my rule is find out where your heart is, then speak from the heart. People know the difference between that and something scripted.