Ronald Harwood Quotes

I had really good English teachers in elementary through high school. Not only were we required to read a lot - which is the best training for writing - we were drilled on grammar every day, every night. I hated the drill part, but I don't dangle my participles too often.

For me, when I read a book, I'm very much about detail.

A good designer has a lot in common with a good researcher. Both hunt for excellence and perfection. And you have to really focus on the details, and you don't really know what the final result will be before you have it.

Many poets, as you know, are not good readers.

A good novelist pays attention to his characters. A good biographer pays attention to the documents before her. A good critic pays close attention to the thing she's brought to evaluate.

An almost indispensable skill for any creative person is the ability to pose the right questions. Creative people identify promising, exciting, and, most important, accessible routes to progress - and eventually formulate the questions correctly.

I think I'm a very good reader of poetry, but obviously, like everybody, I have a set of criteria for reading poems, and I'm not shy about presenting them, so if people ask for my critical response to a poem, I tell them what works and why, and what doesn't work and why.

I would be a liar, a hypocrite, or a fool - and I'm not any of those - to say that I don't write for the reader. I do. But for the reader who hears, who really will work at it, going behind what I seem to say. So I write for myself and that reader who will pay the dues.

You tell me that 'Date Night' was good? I'm not going to see it. I will debate you on it, having no knowledge of the footage in the film. I was next to someone on the plane watching it, and they were dozing off.

I still think like a critic, and I still analyze films like a critic. However, it's not possible to write criticism if you're making films.

Once I began to hear and pay attention to my fledgling ideas, the biggest hurdle was to learn how to respect them. That was hard, because the real way to respect an idea is to invest the attention and work needed to develop it.

Being a good observer is a great tool to have as a writer, just taking the world in.

I'm a language-oriented writer who proceeds sentence by sentence.

The purely agitational attitude is not good enough for a detailed consideration of a subject.

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

Good and bad ideas both come from the same fountain of speculation and experiment.

The reader really has to step up to the plate and read a short story.

Attribution is as much an art as a science.

I write to relieve an intellectual itch. I stumble across a hitherto neglected set of events, transformations, characters, or source materials from the past, and they nag at me until I make sense of them in words. But I also write to seduce and to make my readers think.

The greatest texts, I think, first dazzle, then with careful rereading, they instruct. I have learned from Virginia Woolf more than I even know how to articulate.

In college, I used to underline sentences that struck me, that made me look up from the page. They were not necessarily the same sentences the professors pointed out, which would turn up for further explication on an exam. I noted them for their clarity, their rhythm, their beauty and their enchantment.

Themes only arise after a novel is written, and people begin to try to talk about it.

I usually do watch what I've done because I think it's important. I think you can learn from it and see what you thought you were doing and what ends up on the screen.

Vladimir Nabokov on 'Bleak House' or Henry James on 'The House of the Seven Gables' prove that reading can be an exciting subject in itself, full of passionate encounters, contradictory judgments, striking discoveries, and unexpected reversals.

My idea of teaching literature is just to read great passages aloud or to look at it the way a writer does, which is what I try to do. Which is to say, 'How does this writer do this? How did he order his scenes? Do you notice any pattern to his sentences?'