Sarah Lancashire Quotes

If you cut a painter's hands off, he'd still feel the urge to pick up a brush.

You don't make a film because the audience is ready for it. You make a film because you have questions that are in your gut.

To me that's what art is about - when you don't really have any control over your desires to do it.

Let passion be your muse. Let her guide and teach you to trust your instincts.

My instinct is to absolutely recoil when talking about writing in a mechanistic way. Nothing could be dumber than writing a film or TV script based on prescriptions, on other peoples' ideas of what character should be.

I love the rush of being creative. I really think I live for it.

Offers come all the time, but I'm pretty particular. I really have to be wowed by a character I encounter in a script, or a storyline. I really do need to feel inspiration, otherwise I'm just happy planting perennials and making goat cheese.

But I really believe that you don't do music because you want to, you do it because you have to.

Sometimes you read a script, and you just think, 'Wow, I would love to go and tell that story, and I don't even care what happens to the film, I would just love that experience.' And often, that mentality makes a great film.

I don't want to make a movie till I have an idea I have to make. I don't want to make a movie just to make a movie.

The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.

I really only take roles that I love and that I have some kind of innate compulsion or need to tell that story. Although it's almost like I have no control over it. It's like they choose me.

I'm the kind of person who lives my art. It's not that I want to necessarily do it: it's that I have to. It's always been that way. That's how I write songs, and it's always been this way.

When I get an artistic itch, I have to scratch it.

I have to write. I have to be an artist.

I was talking to so many teenagers for so long that I started to feel like, 'I have my own story I want to tell, and I need to do it soon.' So I started to store away pieces that eventually became 'Speech & Debate.' I felt this burning need to write it while I still had not only all of the ideas but the passion to do it.

If I return to films, the feeling to do it must come from the heart.

For me it's a very organic process. I read the script/hear a narration and pretty much know instantly if it's something I want to be a part of or not. It's really as simple as that.

My passions drive me to the typewriter every day of my life, and they have driven me there since I was twelve. So I never have to worry about schedules. Some new thing is always exploding in me, and it schedules me, I don’t schedule it. It says: Get to the typewriter right now and finish this.

No one begs you to be a poet or write a 1000-page poem. You have to be fueled by a drive, a conviction - a need, a necessity, a vision that is so pressing that it has no other outlet but through you. That doesn't mean that you are unconscious or in trance, but there can be moments like that.

The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus tickets, on the wall of a cell.

In matters like writing and painting, a man does what he has to do - if he has to write, why then, he writes; and if he doesn't feel the urgent need of writing, there are dozens of professions in which it is easier to earn a comfortable living.

I still have an insane drive to create and express myself, and it'll never stop because I don't know how to stop it.

I always wonder what drives us as Artists.

I tell aspiring writers that you have to find what you must write. When you find it, you will know, because the subject matter won’t let you go. It’s not enough to write simply because you think it would be neat to be published. You have to be compelled to write. If you’re not, nothing else that you do matters.