A Quote by Gavin Hood

Athol Fugard became famous as a playwright, so although 'Tsotsi' the book was written in the '60s, it was only published in the '80s. It was then optioned pretty much every year by producers. I think the problem was that holding onto its period setting made it very hard to get finance.
There's a very famous South African playwright named Athol Fugard, and I'd be in any play he's ever did.
My theatrical background was in the great work of the South African playwright Athol Fugard.
The late Nadine Gordimer in South Africa, for example, had a wonderful ability to get her country's injustices and contradictions down on paper. Ditto for her countryman the great playwright Athol Fugard.
If you want to write a book that's very successful and famous, then it's hard. If you just want to get published, all you have to do is convince an editor that your idea will make them money.
Wildlife was the only thing we've written together with Paul Dano. It's based on a book by this author Richard Ford, who just published a memoir about his family that's really wonderful. Paul fell in love with his book, and we optioned it ourselves, and he took a first pass at writing it. He asked me for notes, and then our note session devolved into an argument really quickly.
I loved my time on 'The Mindy Project' so much. It was only supposed to be half a year. It was really only supposed to be one episode, and then it became three episodes, and then it became half a year, and then it became a year and a half, and then it became two years.
I don't set out to write a play a year. Sometimes I've written two plays a year. There was a period of a year and half when I only wrote half a play. If it depresses some critics that I seem prolific, well, that's their problem as much as mine.
Thousands of books are published every year in India, and it's becoming more difficult to stand out and get people to buy the books. The only way to get people notice the book is to create a buzz much before it's released.
In the early '70s, coming out of the '60s, it was very hippy or it was very uniform, like The Beatles all wearing the same suit. Into the '70s, it became much more about a personal style. You had the glam period, which was a lot of fun, and then you went into punk.
Hard work is the main thing-hard work and dedication. And I think a great part of it is goal setting. You set your goals to a point where they're attainable, but far enough away that you have to really go get them. And every year I push my goals a little bit farther away, and every year I work a little bit harder to get them. Every goal that I've set, I've been able to achieve. That's been very fulfilling.
'Presumed Innocent' was written over a six to seven year period with intervals in between where I was figuring out the end of the book and writing other stuff... My life as a writer was carried on against the odds. I had written four unpublished novels by then... as a writer of fiction, I hadn't gotten very far. I just wanted to do it.
Only three or four thrillers are made in Hindi cinema in a year. There is a fascination for crime genre but producers think thrillers don't have that much of a market or will not get picked up for satellite rights.
I think it's very, very, very hard to get a book published. I never want to be one of those teachers that say, 'don't do this, ' because how sad would the world be if people didn't create art and write? But, it's not an easy journey being a writer.
I didn't think [Ella Enchanted] would get published. Everything I'd written till then had been rejected. If it was published, I thought it might sell a few thousand copies and go out of print. I thought if I was lucky I could write more books and get them published, too. I still pinch myself over the way things have worked out.
I started acting pretty much by accident. I was doing read-throughs for a playwright who I was assisting, and then an agency saw me and said they wanted to represent me and get with me through my training and so on and so forth. It was pretty much by chance.
If some day you're struggling with math, and you think, 'I don't think I can do this,' you can - you actually can. Everybody has their hard days - I definitely had mine - and you get through them, and you learn from that stumble, and then you're onto the next problem.
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