Alex Garland Quotes

Whatever it is that I am working on is what I become obsessed with.

If I'm doing a scene that requires a lot of focus, I'll just take myself away and do what I have to do.

I lock myself up in the apartment when I am writing a script. There's no phone, no Wi-Fi, no distractions whatsoever.

When I'm writing I just think there's only the page and me and nobody else.

It's all discipline and schedule for me. I mean, it's very easy to get distracted by the real world and things that intrude constantly, and it takes dedication to live totally in your head and be tuned out.

Twice a year, I take myself off to a self-imposed 'writer's retreat', staying at a small inn or on a friend's farm, where I am all alone and do nothing other than write.

I can get obsessed by anything if I look at it long enough. That's the curse of being a photographer.

A mind which really lays hold of a subject is not easily detached from it.

When I'm making a film, I'm obsessive about what I do, and I get totally into it. That's all I'm eating, breathing, living at that moment.

Probably nothing serious or worthwhile can be accomplished without one's willingness to be alone for sustained periods of time, which is not to say that one must live alone, obsessively.

When I'm in the middle of making a movie, I have blinders on; it's all about just getting the movie out.

I used to have tears in my eyes on the way to practice because I was so focused. For me, track and field was serious business. I didn't have any friends. I was very isolated and very focused.

When I work on stories, I tend to lose sight of everything else. I forget to pay bills or to shave. I don't change my clothes as often as I should.

If you're concentrating so damn hard on a piece of mathematics or a musical - a piece of music or a piece of art, the restraint that holds the rest of - the rest of the world back off and vanishes in the rest of your life.

I'm enslaved to writing to the point where I sacrifice almost everything else.

After 'Memory Keeper's Daughter,' it took me a few months to shut out the world. I really had to turn off the Internet and sort of cloister myself away from the world again and sink into that psychic space to write again.

I obsess over things... especially my book projects. It can be very time consuming.

A creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself, it is a child of solitude.

I find it so all-encompassing when acting that there's no room for anything else when you're in it; you're just locked into thinking about it all day, you go to sleep with it, wake up with it, and when I come back, I really need time to recover.

When I play, I become entirely absorbed in the game. It may be a form of concentration.

Usually I'm pretty myopic. It's hard for me to multi-task, so to speak. If I'm in a show and I'm creating a character, I'm just completely into that. It's really hard for me to do anything else like write music. I have to sort of shut down different sides of my head and just focus.

I am a person who feels compelled and then gets immersed.

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or, rather, you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.

With my writing, because I live it, I have to be consumed by it, and that means you have to forget your other life, which is constantly pulling you from your work.

Reading takes solitude and it takes focus.