Mahershala Ali Quotes
I was going to try to get into the creative writing program at Berkeley; it's just that the acting thing worked out.
Quotes to Explore
-
Any creative process comes with a level of self-analysis and self-criticism. There's a lot of waking up in the middle of the night going, 'Oh, I wish I had done that differently.'
-
I had an agent in Salt Lake City, but acting was more like a hobby.
-
Writing is like a contact sport, like football. You can get hurt, but you enjoy it.
-
All writing is that structure of revelation. There's something you want to find out. If you know everything up front in the beginning, you really don't need to read further if there's nothing else to find out.
-
Writing requires the concentration of the writer, demands that nothing else be done except that.
-
You get on the radio by writing your own songs. But we had the dilemma of not being able to play anywhere because we weren't able to play anything that anyone wanted to hear. So we learned songs that we thought that we could do without puking.
-
I am just doing photo shoots. It's not something that extraordinary. I'm not a great artist, I'm not writing books, I'm not a painter, and people in the streets ask me for a picture or a note, and I say, 'Why?'
-
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.
-
I always tell young actors to have a back-up. You don't want to find yourself at the age of 30 still struggling to make a living out of acting.
-
Hard writing makes easy reading.
-
I don't think you have to be in these serious, heavy, independent little movies to be an actor. Some of the most interesting acting I've seen is on cable television.
-
I've made a kind of pact with myself where I said, It doesn't matter what it is as long as I'm acting.
-
Writing about a person whose struggle you wish you could solve is an act of compassion and also, frankly, opportunism.
-
Personal relationships are usually my biggest inspirations for writing my songs. The best way for me to write a song is to visualise the story in my head, and I start humming a melody, and before you know it, a song is born.
-
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.
-
Just as I could tell you about my first Andre Norton novel or my first L'Engle or my first Asimov, I could write a paragraph about how each of these writers influenced me, my writing, and my thoughts, and do to this day.
-
Great indeed is the sublimity of the Creative, to which all beings owe their beginning and which permeates all heaven.
-
Acting is equal parts talent and perseverance.
-
When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.
-
All good writers inspire me as I have never thought I was any good. As far as a writer who made me think I could do it, it was Henry Miller. Not because I thought he was so simple that I reckoned I could pull it off as well, but it was his freedom and guts that really moved me to want to write all the time.
-
Always I try to write about people. People are interested in other people always.
-
Christ is most concerned with the direction in which you habitually are going and not with a spasmodic eruption either good or bad.
-
I really enjoy taking care of people, and I was really ready to have a kid, so I didn't have to sacrifice anything that I didn't want to give up.
-
I was going to try to get into the creative writing program at Berkeley; it's just that the acting thing worked out.
