Alan Kay Quotes

Writing is not chewing your nails and picking your teeth, but a matter of public interest.

Writing good dialogue is art as well as craft.

I am more of a visual person than a verbal person. For me, I think, the excitement is the fact that I found a way of telling the story as I want to tell it, in a medium that I could master.

There's a powerful magic about being a writer that I still marvel at.

Speech is my hammer bang the world into shape now let it fall - HUNGH

I'm one dude that writes his adlibs. I don't just go in there and say "Gimme a track." I say what I'ma say here [then] I put effects on my voice. Why not? I wrote it. Why not show the talent? Why be scared? That's why I hate certain fans who hate cause it's not like raw hip-hop, like boom bap.

There's a point where you find yourself tiptoeing as an artist, and then you know that you're in the wrong place.

Writing stories is a kind of magic, too.

I don't believe that you can possibly separate expression from thought in an imaginative work. The better a thing is expressed, the more completely it is thought.

All the new media are art forms which have the power of imposing, like poetry, their own assumptions.

Try to produce your own films, avoid directing for hire.

There's a marvelous sense of mastery that comes with writing a sentence that sounds exactly as you want it to. It's like trying to write a song, making tiny tweaks, reading it out loud, shifting things to make it sound a certain way... Sometimes it feels like digging out of a hole, but sometimes it feels like flying. When it's working and the rhythm's there, it does feel like magic to me.

What is an artistic picture? An artistic picture is very simple. The creator is not the producer. The creator is not the star. The creator is the director, the person who realizes the picture, like a poet, like an artist. The creator of the picture is free to do whatever he wants, how he wants to do it. That is an artistic picture.

I think the best thing I learned from drawing comics is that it's a great exercise in concision.

I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. Dumbo got airborne with the help of a magic feather; you may feel the urge to grasp a passive verb or one of those nasty adverbs for the same reason. Just remember before you do that Dumbo didn’t need the feather; the magic was in him.

What is my intention being a filmmaker? To make as much money as possible, or get as much attention as possible? It's not really either of those things. Now I can tell the stories that I want to tell.

I guess every musician looks forward to a point where they can just kind of make an album that truly is like a nice art album.

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.

One is neither too scrupulous nor too sincere nor too submissive to nature; but one is more or less master of one's model, and, above all, of the means of expression.

I don't want to analyze myself or anything, but I think, in fact I know this to be true, that I enter the world through what I write. I grew up believing, and continue to believe, that I am a screw-up, that growing up with my family and friends, I had nothing to offer in any conversation. But when I started writing, suddenly there was something that I brought to the party that was at a high-enough level.

I write a song because I want to. I think the moment you start writing it to make money, you're starting to kill yourself artistically.

Singing is like going to a party at someone else's house. Acting is like having the party at your own house.

Fortunately, I have an amazing partner that allows us to do these different things, who will be directing an episode himself soon, I'm sure. But, it's amazing. I love directing and I think that it allowed me to get closer to the actors and actually work with them on a level that I haven't before, and really get down there with them. I would jump at the chance to do it, anytime I could.

I demanded a realm in which I should be both master and slave at the same time: The world of art is the only such realm.

I just try and do something good. But as a writer, you're slightly out of control.