Dee Rees Quotes

I just always wanted to be left alone to go into a creative space.

Creatively, it's great, because when you write your own movies, you get to create whatever you want.

I'm most happy when I am writing at night, because I need space and time to write.

When you're writing, it's a very solitary job. It's you and your word processor and a cup of tea.

There are no laws by which we can write Iliads.

Few pleasures are greater than knowing you can close your door, ignore the world and create your own.

A creative person has to be alive. He can't borrow from things he's done in the past. He can't let his method choose his subjects or his characters. They can't be warped to fit his style.

A friend of mine who writes history books said to me that he thought that the two creatures most to be pitied were the spider and the novelist - their lives hanging by a thread spun out of their own guts. But in some ways I think writers of fiction are the creatures most to be envied, because who else besides the spider is allowed to take that fragile thread and weave it into a pattern? What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it to create some semblance of order.

I get to draw what I like to draw, basically people hangin' around, and write very humanistic kinds of situations and characters. But I do also like to draw adventure stories - more in terms of drawing them than writing them - and letting my imagination go wild.

For me to write I have to be, a, alone, and b, know that nobody is going to question me. I write the way a thief steals; it's a little covert.

I like the fact that I can go away and lose myself so I don't have to live in the world of courage that everyone else does. I like creating, it's what I do, and acting allows me to stretch all those different muscles in all kinds of ways. That's pretty cool.

It's exciting to watch people do and write and say what they feel like doing, writing and saying.

As a writer, you are free.

Writing a novel is an incredibly free experience. One puts one's self in a narrative mode. You can go off in any direction - the past, the future, or go laterally, or include one's own beliefs. It's total freedom.

They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art.

A novelist has a specific poetic license which also applies to his own life.

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

Writing is hard work, but a lot of fun, too. It allows me to live out some of my fantasies.

It all has to do with art - writing, painting, things I've done for a long time but just never had enough time to pursue. I have poetry - things that are designed for songs, but they're always poems first.

I started out life as a writer, and writers write in part because they don't want to talk.

I learnt to love reading. And then I started scribbling stories, and I liked that even more.

The thing that I enjoy about animation is the fact that it is unbridled, and there are no boundaries; when you are in the room, you don't have to focus on your clothing, make-up, hair, your choreography or your blocking; you really do have total freedom.

I would advise you to write, my dear friend, because with your active nature, solitude is simply intolerable to you, and after some time your solitude would become perhaps attractive if you were to people it with creatures of your own fancy.

I can gabble on now, but I couldn't when I was a kid, so I spent a lot of time in my own head on the moors by myself. It felt like writing was the right way to express myself.

France was very opposite of the show-business experience I'd been living; I was anonymous and alone. I wore no makeup, wore the same clothes every day. And I wrote and wrote and wrote.