Nancy Atherton Quotes
...the writing is writ large on the wall: Mother Earth will continue to punish us with floods, famines, and fires until we learn to behave as custodians of the natural world rather than as its conquerors.
Quotes to Explore
-
'Skins' is about a group of teenagers in Bristol, and it's all about what they get up to and all the different things they do. I think it's a good show because it's come from a very real place, and there's a lot of young people involved in the writing.
-
I guess I went into journalism to save the world. I always felt through writing that I wanted to rotate the world slightly.
-
'Yellow Moon' was a poem. My wife at the time, Joel - she's dead now - it was our 25th anniversary. She had the chance to go on a cruise with her sister. And I'm home with the kids and looking up, and I saw the big moon, and I just started writing.
-
Writing 'William Shakespeare's Star Wars' was a fun exercise in mixing just the right amount of the Bard with just the right amount of everyone's favorite galaxy far, far away.
-
Revision is the heart of writing. Every page I do is done over seven or eight times.
-
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.
-
I like writing about biology, not doing it.
-
One of the pleasantest things about book writing is that sometimes it brings one in touch with old friends.
-
Black people were very angry with me for writing the book. A lot of people didn't believe me, or didn't want to believe me, and that used to really bother me. It was a very painful and difficult time.
-
I've been writing fiction probably since I was about 6 years old, so it's something that is second nature to me now. I just sit down and start writing. I don't sit down and start writing and it comes out perfectly - it's a process.
-
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.
-
Be aware of who in your life is actually interested in hearing you discuss your writing, and who's just asking to be polite. Listening to writers talk about their work is often excruciatingly dull.
-
I have no interest in writing, directing or producing.
-
It's kind of a catch-22 now because since the 'Da Vinci Code,' I have access to places and people that I didn't have access to before, so that's a lot of fun for somebody like me, but I'm always trying to keep a secret. I don't want people to know what I'm writing about.
-
I had casually rented an apartment that cost $75 a month because I expected my writing to pay my way.
-
However far fiction writers stray from their own lives and experiences - and I stray pretty far from mine - I think, ultimately, that we may be writing what we need to write in some way, albeit unconsciously.
-
When writers stop to sharpen pencils or get up and make coffee to procrastinate, they still stay in their heads with their characters. But when you zip over to read email or check your Facebook page, you get zapped out of the fictive dream. It's brutal on my writing.
-
I'm a writer who simply can't know what I'm writing about until the writing lets me discover it. In a sense, my writing process embraces the gapped nature of my memory process, leaping across spaces that represent all I've lost and establishing fresh patterns within all that remains.
-
I found it really hard for a couple of years to do any writing because all I wanted to do was play the fiddle. From the minute I took it up, I just couldn't put it down.
-
I know that one of the things that I really did to push myself was to write more formal poems, so I could feel like I was more of a master of language than I had been before. That was challenging and gratifying in so many ways. Then with these new poems, I've gone back to free verse, because it would be easy to paint myself into a corner with form. I saw myself becoming more opaque with the formal poems than I wanted to be. It took me a long time to work back into free verse again. That was a challenge in itself. You're always having to push yourself.
-
Joining a radical movement when one is young is very much like falling in love when one is young. The girl may turn out to be rotten, but the the experience of love is so valuable it can never be entirely undone by the ultimate disenchantment.
-
My parents were missionaries - I was born in the States but I grew up in Brazil.
-
Then you get into it, especially if you start talking about football, fighting and Muhammad Ali. Then the ladies get very bored and start delivering ultimatums.
-
...the writing is writ large on the wall: Mother Earth will continue to punish us with floods, famines, and fires until we learn to behave as custodians of the natural world rather than as its conquerors.
