Elmore Leonard Quotes

There's nothing worse than the frustration of having somebody who you feel doesn't get what you're doing, trying to turn it into something else. It's a very, very annoying and sort of frustrating thing and I just never wanted to go through it. I was very fortunate as I came up through the film business that I was able to insulate myself from that.

I thought when I started writing that I'd have a book out in four or five years, and as it became apparent that that wasn't going to happen, I became increasingly frustrated and unsure of myself.

What had happened was this. When still young, I had gotten the idea from somewhere that I might be able to write... Maybe the deadly notion came from liking to read so much. Maybe I was in love with the image of being a writer. Whatever. It had been a really bad idea. Because I couldn't write, at least not by the bluntly and frequently expressed standards of anyone in a position to offer any encouragement and feedback.

With all the movies I've made about history, it's not really fun because you're trying to get it right. You've got history telling how it was, and then my imagination is telling me how I wish it had been, but I can't go there, so I have to censor myself. I'm very good about stopping myself from creating history that never occurred, but it's frustrating.

It takes me awhile to find something that I'm passionate about. I'm reading a lot and thinking a lot, and torturing myself a lot because I'm feeling really guilty for not writing something today.

There is nothing fiercer than a failed artist. The energy remains, but, having no outlet, it implodes in a great black fart of rage which smokes up all the inner windows of the soul. Horrible as successful artists often are, there is nothing crueler or more vain than a failed artist.

I had been a fashion photographer for over ten years, but I'd always been dissatisfied with what I was doing. It was all about selling people, and I got disheartened by the whole industry.

What I really want to do is produce. There isn’t much patience with a slow developing story line anymore.

I never really got the book together for the thing, so I had all the songs and the characters. But by the time we'd gotten it on the road and I'd been doing it for 18 months, oh God, I couldn't wait to move on to something else.

We spend so much money on these dresses that are terrible. And what do we get out of it? Nothing - a piece of chicken and a roll in the hay with her hillbilly cousin - no thank you. My family's very close; I can do that at home.

What I really like to do is to sit quietly and write. All that other stuff is a problem. Publication to reception to negotiation to... everything, it's a problem. And I like to sit outside for long periods of time and just be in the tranquility of nature. That's what I like.

I shouldn't make movies anymore. I should go to a lunatic asylum.

I don’t have music, Christ I wish I had music but all I have is words.

I, as a young guy getting out of music school, I didn't like the prospect of spending my life writing music for about 200 people.

Our genius ain't appreciated around here... let's scram!

The reason I feel bad for Steve Kloves is because he doesn't enjoy cutting things out. He's not sitting there with scissors, just laughing maniacally, going, "Ahahaha." He doesn't like doing it. The stories mean so much to him. But it had to go. And David kept saying, "We're gonna try, we're gonna try, we're gonna try" all the way into the shoot until the very last days, when he said, "Sorry, it's just not gonna work."

There's a lot of frustration in trying to get music out when you're the only one who hears it, especially if you have something in your head that's not normal.

The thing I'm going through is probably like the same thing that Little Richard and all these other artists go through, that I hear about them, saying, 'Oh damn, you ain't gonna give me nothing till I die,' ... I feel like I'm one of those type of great people that just going to have to wait till it's all over with for people to really sit around and talk about it.

I can't think why I was cursed with this inordinate desire to write, if the high gods weren't going to give me some more adquate means of expressing myself than that which my present pedestrian prose affords.

Almost every truly creative being alienated & expatriated in his own country

I'd always hoped to write the story as a novel, but there was a long period when the [Bridget Jones's Baby: The Diaries] movie was stalled and in confusion. I felt frustrated creatively, and just couldn't work on the Baby material till the movie was sorted out.

I'm not sure I would call it agony but there is a kind of cyclic frustration. You get one story right and then here comes another one. When does that end? What I'm trying to do is get it to end right now, by recognizing that that cycle is writing. That is: trying to understand the frustrations and setbacks (and agony) as part of a bigger chess game you are playing with art itself.

A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.

Sometimes something will come along, and it feels easy and sometimes you'll get 85 percent there on a song and the last 15 percent will elude you for three years.