Pearl Cleage Quotes
When you're writing first person, all I can see and tell as the author is what that main character can see.
Quotes to Explore
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While you are improvising, you need to be prepared, and I like to have a sense of who the character is, what she likes to read, where she grew up, where we went to school, and what she has for breakfast, so that when I go to set, I'm free to explore.
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Wit is the appearance, the external flash of imagination. Thus its divinity, and the witty character of mysticism.
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My own writing has perhaps more of an American flavor than a British one, but that's because the stories I've so far written have needed it. 'Empire State,' 'Seven Wonders' and 'The Age Atomic' are all very place-centric, where the setting itself is almost a character. But there is a universality to story that isn't just limited to science fiction.
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I know feeling pressure gets you nowhere creatively. You've just got to understand the character, understand the story, and just play it to the fullest extent.
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Songwriter friends will be like, 'Oh my God, when are you going to put out 'Love Triangle?'' It's just been that song for me that really helped me get a lot of writing sessions and helped jump-start my writing career.
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I think that the idea that I'm writing for many more people than I ever imagined has created a certain general responsibility that is literary and political. There's even pride involved, in not wanting to fall short of what I did before.
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I can be collaborative, for instance, in situations where I go and study the artist's work before I start writing. Then I can at least try to write towards their style.
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Anne Boleyn is an intriguing character. She seems to appeal to modern-day women in a very potent way. Because she was such an independently opinionated and spirited young woman, which at the time was unheard of.
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I actually run a non-profit where one of the main objectives is to branch out and get a new audience for the theater. Just because the writing is so good and nothing is more effective than seeing something live and happening right in front of your face, so I definitely want to continue to pursue that.
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The ego being shattered is not what frightens me - that can be useful for writing - but the ego being inflated is sort of like it dying of gout.
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Unlike the stereotypical author, I've never had a job as a short-order cook, but I love cooking hot breakfasts for lots of people, juggling the eggs and the bacon and the tomatoes and the fried potatoes and so on.
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There's a rule of writing: if everything is funny, nothing is funny; if everything is sad, nothing is sad. You want that contrast.
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Movie making is not like other art forms, like painting, or writing a novel, because that can be digested or interpreted... It takes two years to make each one of these, and it's always judged on money.
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A crime is like a crack in reality, and it is the author's role to explore those cracks. As a writer, I like to see how they impinge on people.
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I always wear the shoes of the character a week before going on set; the idea of just putting on a new pair of shoes on the first day of filming is just horrific.
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Instead of writing songs for girls, I tend to write albums, which I guess is a bit weird.
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The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.
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Special-interest magazines are dangerous places for writers to start out in because the writing quickly falls into a routine and people are likely to find themselves artistically exhausted when they want to work on something of their own.
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I'm so damn boring. I like reading and writing and making coffee. And walking. Barry Jenkins likes long walks.
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Usually I'm pretty myopic. It's hard for me to multi-task, so to speak. If I'm in a show and I'm creating a character, I'm just completely into that. It's really hard for me to do anything else like write music. I have to sort of shut down different sides of my head and just focus.
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Short fiction is like low relief. And if your story has no humor in it, then you're trying to look at something in the pitch dark. With the light of humor, it throws what you're writing into relief so that you can actually see it.
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My dad had this philosophy that if you tell children they're beautiful and wonderful then they believe it, and they will be. So I never thought I was unattractive. But I was never one of the girls at school who had lots of boyfriends.
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When I started watching matches, it was those of Marseille. After that, it was Lyon. I went to see them all the time in the league or the Champions League with my dad.
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When you're writing first person, all I can see and tell as the author is what that main character can see.
