Brian Moore Quotes

A writer is a spectator, looking at everything with a highly critical eye.

For a writer it's a dream to sit and watch people as close as possible.

If I had a talent, it was for looking askew at everything, possibly more than my contemporaries. But I had to really push myself to be a writer.

I just let the character speak to me and things appear.

There are two sides to me. One is the writer. That's a savage person who looks at everything as a story and, you know, wants to use real life in his books. The other part is the Midwesterner, who, you know, wants to say nice things about people and be polite.

I'm only interested in fiction that in some way or other voices the very imagination which is conceiving it.

You are the plays you write. How on earth could you write them otherwise? They're projections of your own predilections.

I write from the voice in my head.

The imagination conjures gifts; what the ungrateful, unsentimental part of the mind has to do is to unwrap them, find fault with them, see them for what they are and then alter them.

Through writing, through that process, they realize that they become more intelligent, and more honest and more imaginative than they can be in any other part of their life.

That's a really good question - what is it like living with a writer? I guess it depends on the writer. You know what? They live in a fantasy world a lot of the time. My husband lives in a fantasy world.

It is not that Shakespeare's art is in technicolor and fancy, and that real life is black and white and tedious. The life that Shakespeare was living was the only life he had, and he had to use it to create what he was doing.

The pleasure that I take in writing gets me interested in writing a poem. It's not a statement about what I think anybody else should be doing. For me, it's an interesting tension between interior and exterior.

I learned quite early on in life that we are all two people. And one of those people none of us will ever know.

I get plenty of time to re-engage with the world I'm trying to depict, so I'm not always living in these parallel worlds.

When I sit down to write, I consider myself an artist.

I'm not so presumptuous to feel that they're gonna get it right away, get exactly what I have in mind. I hope that they'll enjoy looking at it at any rate, whatever it is. And that's why I started writing stories on my work.

It's a very hard thing for all of us to accept ourselves at all the different stages - the horrible side, the wonderful side, the adorable side - and who you are as a grownup. And then to bring what you learned as a child to that grownup: that is the magic of creativity.

Art is really about perception, and mine have been changed through visiting other realities.

The lessons of slushing and editing build up over time, and you're not necessarily thinking about them while you're working, but they're in the back of your mind, probably influencing your choices.

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.

Being a writer is a very private, internal process. Ultimately I am more the writer, being an introvert.

Actors may not realize the extent of their own power. Acting is creation. It's them bringing their own stuff, letting it marinate in their soul, in their creative engine.

I can't sculpt. But if I were a sculptor, as you start to get something that actually looks like what you want, then it starts to be fun. That's the way I find writing.