James Frank Quotes

I'm not one of these 'the characters write themselves; the story just fell out of me' kind of writers. Wish it was like that.

I have never stopped considering not becoming a writer.

My dream was never to become this unattainable star.

It's actually very difficult to come up with a new name for something that hasn't already been bagged by someone else, unless you call your new show 'Shubbley-Doobley-Woobley' or something like that!

A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality, and he trusts he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results.

It is the curse of talent that, although it labors with greater steadiness and perseverance than genius, it does not reach its goal, while genius already on the summit of the ideal, gazes laughingly about.

Writing a novel in general is like trying to reach a mountain top you'll never quite reach - so you try again and maybe get a little closer.

I wear myself out trying to render the orange trees so that they're not stiff but like those I saw by Botticelli in Florence. It's a dream that won't come true.

The world will fall, the gods will die, and I will never achieve a perfect score on this stupid machine. -Dionysus

Moral beauty is the basis of all true beauty. This foundation is somewhat covered and veiled in nature. Art brings it out, and gives it more transparent forms. It is here that art, when it knows well its power and resources, engages in a struggle with nature in which it may have the advantage.

The poems ... are moments when I had the intensity to see, and the energy to build, some careful analog that completed the seeing. ... All I have been left is the exhausting habit of trying to tack up the slack in my life with words.

Already the writers are complaining that there is too much freedom. They need some pressure. The worse your daily life, the better your art. If you have to be careful because of oppression and censorship, this pressure produces diamonds.

A writer always wears glasses and never combs his hair. Half the time he feels angry about everything and the other half depressed. He spends most of his life in bars, arguing with other dishevelled, bespectacled writers. He says very 'deep' things. He always has amazing ideas for the plot of his next novel, and hates the one he has just published.

I find it really hard to throw myself into something artistically where I'm making up a whole character and finding something for that character to do.

I feel much more comfortable in politics than I did in book writing. Book writing is so hard. Politics felt easy compared to that.

I don’t ask writers about their work habits. I really don’t care. Joyce Carol Oates says somewhere that when writers ask each other what time they start working and when they finish and how much time they take for lunch, they’re actually trying to find out, "Is he as crazy as I am?" I don’t need that question answered.

Remember that you don't write a story because you have an idea but because you have a believable character.

When you are creating your character there are a lot of questions and sometimes you doubt if you are making the right choices.

Lenin is an artist who has worked men, as other artists have worked marble or metals. But men are harder than stone and less malleable than iron. There is no masterpiece. The artist has failed. The task was superior to his capacities.

The best work that I am able to do is when I am willing to write about questions I haven't quite figured out, or things I'm really wrestling with, things that keep me up at night.

One of the hardest parts of writing is writing from the gut or the heart or something like that rather than intellectually.

Here's what I love: I love sitting at my desk, staring at the blank screen, and beginning that conversation with my imaginary friends.

Normally, filmmakers would just write a script and cast people to act as certain characters in the story. But in my way of doing things, I have the actors in my mind already, so I'm trying to borrow something that's unique to them. The characters have a very natural connection to the actors themselves.

My experience as a writer is that you really do write seven and eight pages to find the paragraph you were after all along.

Every life is a tragedy, but far more the writer's life, because the more he has to see, the more deeply he understands and feels about life, the less time he has to put it down.