Neil Diamond Quotes

When we were writing for Panic whether we knew it or not, having that name over the songs we were trying to do made me second guess things and change things. I started to go against my instincts.

I think any time you set out to make something, anybody is going to be confronted by those voices in their head that say "You don't need to do this. Someone else can do this better. You should probably just quit right now."

I think most writers can't really think about their work without a kind of revulsion. And I think that's probably why we keep going back and trying again, trying to do better each time.

[Mannerism is when] you think you have all these great ideas, and none of them are good at the end of the day. But while you are pursuing those other things subconsciously happen.

I think subconsciously or selfishly I knew that I was supposed to do something. It was like a thumping or a throbbing saying, "Yes, this what you've been waiting for." But you're a little dim to those spiritual thoughts when you're dumb like me. So I did have to get a little bit of a kick. I played it for a bunch of people and I think their reactions were warm and deep enough that they gave me the courage to get [the record] out there.

Each time I sit down and write a play I try to dismiss from my mind as much as I possibly can the implications of what I've done before, what I'm going to do, what other people think about my work, the failure or success of the previous play. I'm stuck with a new reality that I've got to create.

Help must come from the outside, and it has come and comes daily and answers in the Word of Jesus Christ.

I used to worry I was entirely uninteresting, but the truth is I think if my life was more exciting I'd never have any time to write.

Sometimes I look back and think, "How did I write that? The book is smarter than I am!" I have never written strategically, but rather, followed the dictates of my muse.

I just think God put me on this earth as a tool... showing people you can achieve stuff once you set you mind to things, that it can be accomplished.

I think writing is a difficult thing and you need to suffer a little bit, even if it's just to sit there and think what an idiot you are and how anyone else could do this better than you can.

Human success is a quotation from overhead.

I don't have an idea for a play until after I've finished writing it. I write first, and come up with what it's about later. My technique could be compared to having a large canvas and coming in every day and putting a dot on it somewhere, and after several years - literally - I begin to say, That reminds me of an elephant, so I think I'll make it one.

Art does not come from thinking but from responding.

There's only one of me. With you using the why in the center of your work helps me.

...with each new book of mine I have always the feeling that this time I have picked a lemon in the garden of literature.

I think most novelists I know, certainly including me, feel the novels choose them rather than vice-versa.

I've had people appear in my life that have helped me. I had more fun. I approached it thinking how would Jack Nicholson, "How would he do it?" So that's really what I did was I created this Gremlin character. So now people come up and they say 'Oh The Exorcist!'.. and I'm like "Did you see Repossessed?" They say either no or yes or whatever, and I say look at this, have a laugh, and then go back and look at a masterpiece.

I don't think [Dylan and the Beatles] influenced me a lot. I think it was inevitable; they were so powerful that you couldn't really escape the influence.

I think that perhaps if I had had to slow down the ideas so that I could capture them on paper I might have stifled some of them.

This is who I want to be in the world. This is who I think we are supposed to be, people who help call forth human beings from deep inside hopelessness.

I think I came to film-making through writing. I started to write, and people, teachers, responded to my writing.

You want me to say something? Okay. Sometimes I think I am what you made me. And sometimes I don’t know who I am at all. And either way I’m not happy.

I love the stories that have come before, that we know of. I think for me it's always more interesting to start from square one and you take the fundamental pillars of the character and, around that, try to create something new and different.

Sometimes you write and you find yourself almost wondering how it will turn out. I don't think every writer sort of almost admits that at some stage his books can take on their own kind of life it selves and simply lead away into directions that they're not kind of prepared for.