Diablo Cody Quotes

One day I had an idea for a movie. Everything came after that.

When I go into making a movie, personally, I don't try to bring other pieces of movies with me.

I have a shoebox: for ideas, fragments, snatches of conversation I hear. I scrawl it down, throw the scraps in the box. Every time I start a new script I start picking through the pieces. Suddenly you get five pieces together and think: this is almost the first Act of a movie, if I flesh it out a bit.

Novels begin, not on the page, but in meditation and day-dreaming - In thinking, not writing.

I can't really say - if I've run out of ideas until I've had my next set of ideas.

I think every writer's had the experience of having a really good idea, waiting to write it, and then once you write it, you're like, "Oh I kind of got past the sell by date on this." I'm not connected to the initial spark that was the idea. A lot of that's about staying open.

Stories come to me and I don't know where they come from, but afterwards I can look back and say, 'Oh yes, that's got a little bit of me, or a little bit of my own son in it'. That's where ideas come from.

For me, it would be pointless to write a novel that I knew I could complete within a specific length of time. I could do that only by repeating something I had done before, and I've never wanted to do that.

Quite often, little germs of ideas have come from something that I've observed or someone's told me. The process of it becoming fiction is expanding and extending it: stretching the rubber band of reality.

I keep drawing inspiration from people every day. All of a sudden, something strikes me so hard and dramatically, and then a dream comes - I sit down, cut it off and make a script out of it.

Frank called me one day and said, 'I have an idea for a movie, why don't you come over and I'll tell you?' So I went over and we sat down and he said, 'This picture starts in heaven'. That shook me.

For me, I get a part of an idea here and a little bit of an idea there, and then finally it accumulates into a movie.

The hardest part of this whole movie-making endeavor is finding ideas.

You never know how - or when - the idea for a book will appear.

If I knew a story page by page before I started writing it, I just wouldn't do it. The process of discovery is really important for my own enjoyment.

I started writing movie scripts. They excited me a lot, but I didn't like them when they were finished because they were simple copies of the films I saw in childhood.

Traditionally, the only way I come up with cartoons is by sitting at my desk and thinking.

I've never dreamed of a story idea. I have such boring dreams.

You can't rush inspiration.

I would worry if I wasn't coming up with ideas, if I wasn't inspired.

I say to my pupils, 'You can pitch me any thing you've got, but tell me why you're the only person who can write it in the world. Keep digging.'

I am very interested in behind the scenes, and I am very creative.

The truth is, it is hard to know where ideas come from.

My struggle over the years has constantly been, it only takes 10 minutes, or an average shower, to come up with a mini-series or two, but it takes a year to draw them. So for me, it's been just trying to find a way to get all these ideas and all these incidents on paper.

Once I have a story idea I like it doesn't even matter to me what genre it is, I'm just so happy to have one.