Paullina Simons Quotes

Writing a book is a bit like going on location for a movie. You're absent from your life, your family, and your friends. You're psychologically gone, so you might as well be physically gone.

Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.

For a writer, children make life needlessly hard. I've muddled through a lot of things, but I have not muddled through my writing life. I work absolutely flat out, giving it my all.

When I start a book, I write a minimum of five pages every day, except weekends. If I'm going on a ski trip, I take my computer with me, get up at six, do my five pages, and then go skiing.

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.

I wrote my second novel, 'A Little Life,' in what I still think of as a fever dream: For 18 months, I was unable to properly concentrate on anything else.

If you're writing a novel, you're in a room for three or four years. There's not much coming in from the outside.

When I am writing best, I really am lost in my world. I lose track of the outside world. I have a difficult time balancing between my real world and the artificial world.

Writing a book is a very lonely business. You are totally cut off from the rest of the world, submerged in your obsessions and memories.

I'm not a person who would get up at 5 A.M. to write, but I could sacrifice my Friday night and just order in dinner, sit at home and get into it.

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

I feel like there's a currency to your personal life and your performance - your acting, your work. If that personal life starts to outweigh what the work is, then your work suffers. Your actual performance suffers because the audience won't see the character, they'll see you.

I do tend to lose myself in whatever job I'm doing or hobby I'm into.

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.

When I work on stories, I tend to be pretty obsessive.

Devoting a little of yourself to everything means committing a great deal of yourself to nothing.

When I make a movie, I completely dive into it and I can't really take anything in at all, at that time.

[When working on a book] I have an almost complete detachment from the world I live in, a sort of armor against distraction. I talk to people, move about, appear on the surface much as usual. But later on I have only a confused memory of what has happened during that period.

I write in spurts. I write when I have to because the pressure builds up and I feel enough confidence that something has matured in my head and I can write it down. But once something is really under way, I don't want to do anything else. I don't go out, much of the time I forget to eat, I sleep very little. It's a very undisciplined way of working and makes me not very prolific. But I'm too interested in many other things.

When you do anything creative, you really have to live entirely in that world. I think my ability to do that is what makes me such a bad dinner guest. I'm always looking over someone's shoulder, taking in stuff around the room, immersed in the world of whatever I'm writing about, and keeping the characters completely in my head.

When I am rehearsing for a play, I try to read nothing that might distract my concentration from the work in progress.

If he was lost for a moment, he would dive straight back into its honey.

I really try hard not to work, not to engage, because I know what that means. What hard work it is; it takes me away from my family.

When I'm in the movie, I'm entirely in the movie. When I'm on the set, I'm 200 per cent there; when I'm at home, I'm 200 per cent at home.

I tend to be so lost in the work that I don't notice the weather. My partner will come home and say, 'Beautiful day, wasn't it?' and I'll say, 'Was it?' as I won't have noticed the real world at all.