A Quote by Iain Banks

I love writing and can't imagine not being able to do it. I want an easy life and if it had been difficult I wouldn't be doing it. I do admire writers who do it even though it costs them.
I was able to notice in a very early stage, there were discrepancies between the people who are writing the songs and discrepancies about the self that I was writing about. I was feeling that there were all these different people, both writing the record and having the record being written about them, even though ostensibly it was me sitting down and documenting a series of life experiences. Part of that, when I recognized this unconscious thing I was doing, was about these spaces, about these gaps.
The difficult part of writing about someone you don't admire is that it's easy to demonize them. What you get then is a cackling villain, twirling their mustache at every dastardly deed they commit.
My preference is for good writing. It doesn't matter if it's for film or TV. Whatever. It starts with the writing. Even though I've had problems with writers, it doesn't matter how great of an actor you are. If the writing is bad, you're going to struggle.
As an undergraduate, I took two writing workshops taught by Elizabeth Hardwick. She was certainly a major influence, though more as a writer I greatly admired than as a teacher. As for other writers, I think it's safe to say that my work has been and continues to be influenced to one degree or another by every writer whose work I love and admire.
I love acting. I can't imagine anything else that I would do. I know a lot of actors that really want to be directors and be musicians and all that stuff. I like acting and I feel like I'm good at it. It kinda makes me happy. It's actually pretty easy to me and I can't imagine doing anything else at this point because I've been doing it for so long.
I tried my hand at writing, I tried to write out a little script - and it's not too bad. Mostly, though, it let me understand how incredibly difficult that job is. I can't even imagine doing it on a weekly basis for a series in any way. That's tough. I think I'll try to leave that to smarter people than me.
You're...writing for other writers to an extent-the dead writers whose work you admire, as well as the living writers you like to read.
I think my life will always be worth living, though I don't imagine it being very easy.
Being goal-oriented instead of self-oriented is crucial. I know so many people who want to be writers. But let me tell you, they really don't want to be writers. They want to have been writers. They wish they had a book in print. They don't want to go through the work of getting the damn book out. There is a huge difference.
Love can never be a sin. It can be only a blessing. Even if you're not loved in return -- though I can't imagine that -- to love is a proof of life -- indeed, it's the only proof, for once you can't love another human being, you're not alive.
I don’t think any man writing can worry about what the act of writing costs him, even though at times he is very aware of it.
Writing takes gall. I like to think that's true even for writers with several books under their belt, writers who have been doing it for years. It takes something - guts, gumption, self-delusion - to ask for a reader's time when we all know there's nothing new under the sun; that it's all been said, or written, before.
There are very few things I would love to do other than a life of writing, and I think being a singer-songwriter and being an anthropologist are the two other things I can imagine doing.
For me, it's difficult to even walk around in cotton sarees; imagine doing scenes in them!
If I'm writing by intuition, generally that calculation works itself out. But if I'm writing a mystery, and somebody has to have a reason for doing what he's doing, and it's not anything I can imagine myself wanting to do, things get a little more difficult to write, and careless mistakes are made.
People really want to believe that there is no fiction. I think they find it much easier to imagine that novelists are writing memoirs, writing about their lives, because it's difficult to conceive that there's a great imaginary life in which you can participate.
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