A Quote by Joanne Harris

I don't think I've ever had a mentor. The closest thing is my friend Christopher Fowler, another writer. Chris kept me sane for a long time before I made it. — © Joanne Harris
I don't think I've ever had a mentor. The closest thing is my friend Christopher Fowler, another writer. Chris kept me sane for a long time before I made it.
The best piece of advice I ever received about being a writer came from my brother Lee. I was just starting out and he told me that if I wanted to have a long career, I had to be versatile, that I shouldn't just think of myself in one way, because there would come a time when maybe that one thing wasn't working out for me - and I'd still want to earn a living as a writer.
I am an old, old friend of Aaron Sorkin's, who is the executive producer and writer. He had been talking about doing a political show for a long time and I had been interested in it for a long time. The moment I became available, he called me last year and asked me if I wanted to do it and then I just had to audition for the powers that be, and I got it.
To Grandma, for being my first editor and giving me the best writing advice I’ve ever received: “Christopher, I think you should wait until you’re done with elementary school before worrying about being a failed writer.
I had it in my head when I was in college that I wanted to be a writer, but it took me a long time to commit to being a writer. Up until then, I had worked one dead-end job after another while writing on the side.
And I think one way or another it's evident to those who work with me that as a writer, a director, a friend, as somebody's there that's very anxious to get the movie made.
I remember before I did my HBO special, Chris [Rock] screamed at me - in a loving way, but still. He was like, "You need to do 200 shows in a row and a month straight on the road before you even think about recording a special!" And I had literally booked two weeks on the road and then went right into the recording. It put me in a panic, but it also made me work harder and made me realize that everyone works differently, and that's okay.
--Why are we fighting them? --They're mad. We're sane. --How do we know? --That we're sane? --Yes. --Am I sane? --To all appearances. --And you, do you consider yourself sane? --I do. --Well, there you have it. --But don't they also consider themselves sane? --I think they know. Deep down. That they're not sane. --How must that make them feel? --Terrible, I should think. They must fight ever more fiercely, in order to deny what they know to be true. That they are not sane.
Ever dumb thing I ever done in my life there was a decision I made before that got me into it. It was never the dumb thing. It was always some choice I'd made before it.
I won the argument against the knife that night, but barely. I had some other good ideas around that time--about how jumping off a building or blowing my brains out with a gun might stop the suffering. but something about spending a night with a knife in my hand did it. The next morning I called my friend Susan as the sun came up, begged her to help me. I don't think a woman in the whole history of my family had ever done that before, had ever sat in the middle of the road like that and said, in the middle of her life, "I cannot walk another step further--somebody has to help me.
Wrestling kept me sane during dental school. That was the hardest time of my life, and I don't know how I would have made it without the distractions of wrestling to keep me afloat.
People think you can find a mentor by walking up to somebody and saying, 'Hey, be my mentor,' or by sending an e-mail to someone you've never e-mailed before and saying, 'Hey, I want you to mentor me.' But, mentorship really happens in rooms that you're actually in.
One thing that's happened to me is I've been around a long time and I've played a lot of villains and so forth. I think it had to do with, well one thing is that I looked younger than I was for a long time. Now I think I'm suddenly starting to play people's father.
I've been a writer for a long time but I kind of had to get rid of a lot of the things I learned in Hollywood but I kept some of them too. And things I kept were: don't be precious, kill your darlings is always good, give it dynamics - you don't want it to be all joyful, all sad.
It was a long time ago, we were in the office, and we had finished work exhausted. A friend of a friend said 'Hey, take this it will give you energy,' so I thought I'd try it. I didn't know what it was. It made me laugh and laugh, like crazy...to the point that my back hurt' *he holds his hips* 'like I'd just had a baby.
Obviously I've been reading Kafka for a long long time, since I was really young, and even before I ever read him I knew who he was. I had this weird sense that he was some kind of family. Like Uncle Kafka. Now I really think of him that way, the way we think about an uncle who opened up some path for being in a family that otherwise wouldn't have existed. I think of him that way as a writer and a familial figure.
I think the one reason that writers marry other writers - one of the reasons that I married another writer - was, I fell in love with that writer. But second of all, I had been married before and a source of marital strife was me needing to go away for a couple of weeks to write or it's Saturday and I think I just need to work today and not hang out with you.
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