A Quote by Chinua Achebe
I did not think of writing as a career and I don't think that I did this ever really, but I think of writing as something that I could do, I should do alongside whatever else I was doing. It simply grew on me.
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I think a lot of people are very good, but I don't think anybody could do my rhythm. I was thinking, "If you want my rhythm" - and when I was writing, I was writing them for myself - "why am I watching another actor doing what I should be doing?" It was just a really unpleasant experience.
I did not think that I was angry, but clearly anger was reflected in my writing. I did not think that I had been affected emotionally, but it was clear from my writing that I was still very emotional about the trial some six months after it ended.
When you are in the midst of writing a book, I think it is important to touch base every day. If I wasn't writing something, I would be reading back what I'd already written. I did take a month off writing at one point and found it really difficult to get back into the world I'd created.
The pleasure that I take in writing gets me interested in writing a poem. It's not a statement about what I think anybody else should be doing. For me, it's an interesting tension between interior and exterior.
I grew up writing. It was very natural in my household. My father was a poet, and his mother had been a novelist back in Hungary. I don't think I really thought about it being my career until high school, which is still pretty early, but it was a while there of just assuming this was something everyone did all day long.
I didn't take writing seriously at first - I didn't think I could do it. When I did, I fell in love with it. But writing is very lonely.
Whether it's writing a monologue or writing standup or writing a screenplay or writing a play, I think staying involved in the creation of your own work empowers you in a way, even if you don't ever do it. It gives you a sense of ownership and a sense of purpose, which I think as an actor is really important.
Did I grow up thinking I'd ever be paged at the Beverly Hills Hotel? Did I ever think I'd make so much money writing ads? No.
After my husband died, I could not write much - I could not concentrate. I was too exhausted most of the time even to contemplate writing. But I did take notes - not for fiction, but for a journal, or diary, of this terrible time. I did not think that I would ever survive this interlude.
For me, I'm constantly writing stuff that is what I'm dealing with on a personal, psychological level. And I think that I bring that to whatever I'm doing, whether it's being an actor or a writer or whatever it is I'm doing. I think you can't help but do that.
I think it's dangerous to think you know what you're writing. I usually don't know, and usually I just discover it in the course of writing. I envy those writers who can outline a beginning, a middle, and end. Fitzgerald supposedly did it. John Irving does. Bret Easton Ellis does. But for me, the writing itself is the process of discovery. I can't see all that far ahead.
Often actors ask me if I think they should go on trying to be an actor.
I have the same answer for everyone who asks: If you have a choice and could reasonably be happy doing something else, by all means go at once and do something else.
Acting or writing or directing in the theatre or television or screen is only for the irrecoverably diseased, those who are so smitten with the need that there is no choice.
My colleagues knew I was writing poems. I never hid it from them. I don't think they ever thought I was cheating on them. So, I think they probably saw it as being rather peculiar, that I was doing that sort of thing, but nobody ever suggested I shouldn't be doing it. I think that would be different on Madison Avenue or Wall Street, where you're really expected to be doing 110 percent for the company.
I always think about the role models I had when I was a little girl. They really made me feel how big I could dream, they made me feel I could do things that I did not think I could do before. And because of them, I went and did what I did and I am where I am now.
I don't think anyone is ever writing so that you can throw it away. You're always writing it to be something. Later, you decide whether it'll ever see the light of day. But at the moment of its writing, it's always meant to be something. So, to me, there's no practicing; there's only editing and publishing or not publishing.
Sometimes I think I'm real predictable to myself and other times... you always wonder, Is this really what I wanted to do? Did I make a mistake? Should I be doing something else?
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