Nelsan Ellis Quotes
I'm not an emotional person; I keep it in, and I wouldn't know how to get it out if it weren't for acting and writing.
Quotes to Explore
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When I was around eight, I learned how to touch-type at school, and I received a computer as a present. I started writing plays, and for many years I thought I would be a playwright.
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I've been writing a lot of poetry recently. It helps me think and work things out.
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The first thing my writing ever earned me wasn't an advance on a book; it wasn't a fee for an article or anything like that. It was, in fact, a residency at Hedgebrook Farm.
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I can sit and analyze everything and beat myself up and say you don't quite sing as good as you used to, you're writing better songs maybe than you used to, but to me it's just the journey.
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What works for me is knowing the character in an emotional sense. I wish I was more logical but it doesn't work for me like that. I need quite a lot of time; it's why I always worry when I'm doing more than one thing at a time. I hope that some sort of magic will kick in.
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Then about 1951 I began writing again, painfully, a novel I called in the beginning A Life Sentence on Earth, but which developed into The Tree of Man.
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The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.
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You sit at your computer for hours, then slave away at your job that you may or may not like. You don't know how to explain to them that the time when you feel alive or present is when you are writing.
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I worked initially in very low-budget independent films that I often wrote. My early work was all written by myself, and then I adapted 'Tsotsi,' so I was used to the writing process being, in a way, integral to my directing. I felt it really prepared me.
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When I was writing 'The Windup Girl' and 'Ship Breaker,' I was writing those simultaneously, so I was an unpublished writer, not really having that full sense that these books would go out in the world, that they would be successful, that there would be an audience and that there would be fans of those stories.
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Good acting is all in the writing. If it isn't on the page, then it really won't make any difference. You cannot act on force of personality alone.
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I like collaboration because, first of all, I'm good at writing lyrics. I don't know how to make beats. I don't play instruments. I'm not a good singer. So even when you see a solo album of mine, it's still a collaboration.
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I love writing two narratives! I think concurrent storylines are my favorite way to write a book.
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The thing that makes writing so difficult is you don't have the element of serendipity. At least with a photograph, you can set up the camera, and something might happen. You might be a lousy photographer, but you can get a good picture if you just take enough of them.
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I don't want to name any names, but I've worked on television shows where there's a guy writing for my generation who's, like, 60 - and it doesn't work.
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The nice thing about writing at home is that it's almost as though I'm doing it already. I get out of bed thinking of my work, and I don't have to go anywhere to do it.
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At least half my writing time is spent researching. So for every hour I'm actually clicking on the keyboard, I'm spending another hour trying to figure out some tiny detail I need answered.
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I think - you know, I want to intimidate people when I'm on the field. I want people to be scared of me. That's just kind of the nature of who I am as a person and player. But I also know that you have to be emotional. You have to be in touch with your feelings. I think that's important.
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When I began writing in the mid-1960s, I thought it was not important for readers to know whether I was male or female. Also, I was a great admirer of E.B. White, so I may have thought that it would bring me luck to submit my first manuscript as 'E.L.' But if I were starting out today, I would use my first name.
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I love writing. I've always written journals. I loved writing the book on living alone.
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I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail, while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.
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I want to go to Italy and France; those are my two places. And I really want to go to Greece. I've seen so many pictures on Airbnb that make me think I should be living there. I could eat great salads and be on a boat.
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Why did Father give these humans free will? Now they're all confused.
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I'm not an emotional person; I keep it in, and I wouldn't know how to get it out if it weren't for acting and writing.
