A Quote by Morris Gleitzman

Because of my poor writing posture, I started walking in the forest every day, and I found it a potent place to be creatively. It changed me in that it was a new way of doing my creative process, and I realised how much I liked being among tall trees.
Once I witnessed a windstorm so severe two 100-year-old trees were uprooted on the spot. The next day, walking among the wreckage, I found the friable nests of birds, completely intact and unharmed on the ground. That the featherweight survive the massive, that this reversal of fortune takes place among us — that is what haunts me. I don’t know what it means.
Modern literary theory sees a similarity between walking and writing that I find persuasive: words inscribe a text in the same way that a walk inscribes space. In The practicse of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau writes, 'The act of walking is a process of appropriation of the topographical system on the part of the pedestrian; it is a special acting-out of the place...and it implies relations among differentiated positions.' I think this is a fancy way of saying that writing is one way of making the world our own, and that walking is another.
I found so much fun in the light shows and the multimedia shows of the hippies. That was when I was a student in the 1960s, and I was in New York, so I learned how to deal with writing, recording sound of other people, performance art - because that was a new territory, and I liked everything that was new and provocative. That interested me more than becoming anything specific.
I didn't jump a lot of trees because I didn't like heights. I liked getting a mirror and walking around with it facing the sky. I'd imagine I was walking in the tops of the trees and falling into the sky, or walking up the stairs whilst going down.
I found that pottering is very conducive to my creative process, so now, I find myself being incredibly creative because I've got such much to procrastinate with.
I started to write songs. And I started to like what I was writing. I think it's a new way for me to express things that are closer to myself than when I play a role, because, of course, it's really not me. I'm finding a new way. I don't know what it's going to be. But I know that I will need to give it to people one day.
By always looking out and always moving myself forward and being disciplined and being open to new experiences, I think that's how I was able to diversify because if it felt right to me creatively, I went for it. It didn't matter if I knew how to do that, I just did it because my creative heart felt pulled to it. That seems to have worked out.
I felt that in a way, I hated the writing process so much. It's excruciating, as I'm sure you know, and so lonely being in the solitary prison of my office. A lot of brain-wracking. It just felt like it was so much hard work, and I would send it away. I felt as though I was doing all of this heavy lifting, this weightlifting, every day, all day. It was excruciating. And I stayed skinny, and someone else got all the muscles. I was eating all my vegetables, but then I wouldn't get dessert. To me, directing is the dessert.
Michael Jackson really turns my life and changed my creative process as well. "Keep On Loving You" really honors him and honors my relationship with him so much so that the family, the estate and Sony Music gave me permission to use footage from our time on tour together in my new video. I am just so, so honored that they sought to do that because they didn't have to do that at all. It's a brilliant gesture because they realized how much he meant to me. When you hear the song and watch the video, you'll get that too.
People ask me when I decided to become a playwright, and I tell them I decide to do it every day. Most days it's very hard because I'm frightened - not frightened of writing a bad play, although that happens often with me. I'm frightened of encountering the wilderness of my own spirit, which is always , no matter how many plays I write, a new and uncharted place. Every day when I sit down to write, I can't remember how it's done.
When I started doing improvise music in Europe, in the beginning I thought the way that Europeans were interpreting the reconstruction of deconstruction of this thing that we call jazz - of course it's different than what Americans do, because Europeans have a different history, a different sensibility and so forth - the nature of the creative process itself it's the same; but what comes from that creative process is different, because you have a different history, you have a different society, different language.
Walking in the street, particularly in a city like New York, every single day, I am reminded of how objectified women can be. Being catcalled every day, multiple times a day, all the time... it just constantly happens.
I was very combative as a creative person at that time [while The Ben Stiller Show]. I didn't understand how to play politics with the studios. I didn't know how to creatively collaborate with the people who were paying the bills, and that came up all the time on every project I was doing, and it took me a really long time to figure out how to collaborate in a healthy way.
The wind comes creeping, it calls to me to come go exploring. It sings of the things that are to be found under the leaves. It whispers the dreams of the tall fir trees. It does pipe the gentle song the forest sings on gray days. I hear all the voices calling me. I listen. But I cannot go.
Till the time I found a creative outlet, I was trying to be extra creative at business, which would always put me in a situation of conflict with other stakeholders. The moment I started writing, my creative impulses were finally channelised.
Poverty assumes so many aspects here in India. There aren't only the poor that you see in the cities, there are the poor among the tribes, the poor who live in the forest, the poor who live on the mountains. Should we ignore them as long as the poor in the cities are better off? And better off with reference to what? To what people wanted ten years ago? Then it seemed like so much. Today it's no longer so much.
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