F. Sionil Jose Quotes

When I make a film, I don't watch a lot of other films. I read a lot; I try to read poems, things that can liberate my human condition, that make me go away... I spend a lot of the time doing nothing, just concentrating on the subject. Sometimes I'll sit in my chair for two or three hours without doing anything.

Writing in my closet, it's a small space but it made a lot of room in my mind.

Our souls need time to think, dream, and reflect.

Now painting is different. It's something recollected in tranquility.

I have created a life style that supports contemplation, service to words.

I mostly write on my own, walking, outside.

I don't meditate in any formal way, but I often lie in bed or find myself in nature and enter into that state of quiet where I get images, feelings, or melodies.

The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.

Although even when I am being idle I have plenty of food for thought both early and late - thoughts both about and not about art.

Part of a writer's job is just spacing out, looking into the air and imagining things.

The privilege of being a writer is that you have this opportunity to slow down and to consider things.

I do find walking is fundamental to my creative process.

I'm thankful to have time to write.

The tough thing about writing is you go into a room alone, you close the door and you do your work.

I like to go into a space, listen, absorb, and then interpret.

As a writer, I'm mostly at my desk, staring out my window. No one sees me.

My biggest bits of advice are, write as much as you can, finish what you start, get a thick skin, don't take crap from anyone, but also live your life and have fun. The stereotype of a writer holed up alone all day is really unhelpful. You can't write real people and real emotion if you don't let yourself experience them.

It is generally recognized that creativity requires leisure, an absence of rush, time for the mind and imagination to float and wander and roam, time for the individual to descend into the depths of his or her psyche, to be available to barely audible signals rustling for attention. Long periods of time may pass in which nothing seems to be happening. But we know that kind of space must be created if the mind is to leap out of its accustomed ruts, to part from the mechanical, the known, the familiar, the standard, and generate a leap into the new.

As writers we live life twice, like a cow that eats its food once and then regurgitates it to chew and digest it again. We have a second chance at biting into our experience and examining it. ...This is our life and it's not going to last forever. There isn't time to talk about someday writing that short story or poem or novel. Slow down now, touch what is around you, and out of care and compassion for each moment and detail, put pen to paper and begin to write.

A writer is like a bag lady going through life with a sack and a pointed stick collecting stuff.

Writing at least is a silent meditation even though you’re going a hundred miles an hour.

Our imagination just needs space. It's all it needs, that moment where you just sort of stare into the distance where your brain gets to sort of somehow rise up.

In the books I have written, I have created in my mind a universe. My kids say I have a village in my head and I live in that village, and it's true. When I start writing a book, characters from previous books reappear. All my emotions, my mind, my heart, my dreams, everything becomes connected with a new book, and nothing else really matters.

I'm just interested in meditating on certain ideas, and I like to draw: that's my way of thinking.

Inspiration comes from everything from the entire world, and it's hard to pinpoint one thing. I can trace one inspiration to the writing of 13th-century Zen master Dogen Zenji, who writes beautifully about time.