A Quote by Neil LaBute

It's funny how that comes up, because sometimes I'll write something and I'll think, I don't know if that's a film or a play, and then other things I feel very strongly about them just being plays - they feel very theatrical to me.
Some men don't want their women to speak up, and then other men are attracted to that very thing. But as a woman, you don't want to be just window dressing. I've probably been unattractive to some men because I do say what I feel and what I think. You can be political about it, but I don't have a red flag. I don't have a mechanism in my head that prevents me from saying what I think, or if something upsets me or if I feel like I'm being degraded. I come from a family of very outspoken women. I can't imagine living in a time when you couldn't express what you felt.
I write in spurts. I write when I have to because the pressure builds up and I feel enough confidence that something has matured in my head and I can write it down. But once something is really under way, I don't want to do anything else. I don't go out, much of the time I forget to eat, I sleep very little. It's a very undisciplined way of working and makes me not very prolific. But I'm too interested in many other things.
Food is one of my favourite things. Though I certainly know lots of people who happen to be happily married who don't have food play the role in it that it plays in my life. And I don't know how they do it, and frankly I feel so bad for them because I just love food and one of my favourite things is asking, "What do we want for dinner? What do we feel like eating?" That wonderful negotiation that goes on several times a week about what "we" feel like.
For me songwriting is very...it's almost like an accident. 'Oh I accidentally wrote about that.' I sit down with the urge to write a song and then afterward it turns out being really personal. I get really overwhelmed by how I feel a lot and sometimes - I feel like my body and my brain can't deal with all the different emotions and I feel like I'm just going to explode.
The thing I know how to do most is write a play. I came up loving plays and learning about plays and writing plays. I actually feel like an outsider when I'm writing movies and television.
I just write about how I'm feeling at the time. If I feel like being cheeky and a bit straight up and a bit aggressive, you'll hear that in my music. If I feel like being very vulnerable and opening up about something personal, you'll hear that, too.
I just feel like TV takes more risks than film. Film has gotten very safe: it's very compartmentalized about what type of things will be successful. And whereas in TV, since all these new platforms opened, they're saying to writers, go out there, write the most different show that you can write. Write something that's really original and different.
Feeling is always first for me in anything. I think the only way for sure that I know how do that is to write songs about things I feel strongly about.
To me, when one is writing sometimes about a very specific subject with very specific people, I feel like if that story doesn't cross over, it's not working. That's very beautiful to me, to be sitting in Berlin and there's an actor reading my book in German. I don't even know what's going on, except I know to feel my own rhythms in another language and say, "If this is going well, I think everyone should laugh around now." Then maybe there's laughter, and for me, it reminds me of how story can move around the world.
I may not know the weight of those things, but I could feel the weight of that one, so I kept it to myself. You know that things aren't going well for you when you can't even tell people the simplest fact about your life, just because they'll presume you're asking them to feel sorry for you. I suppose it's why you feel so far away from everyone, in the end; anything you can think of to tell them just ends up making them feel terrible.
I just don't feel that we've traveled very far in the realm of social equality. There just seems to be a little bit of unrest. And sometimes I think that happens when you really feel like something's about to change. Right before the moment of lift off, sometimes things feel a little bit unhinged, and that's what it feels like to me right now, both as a woman and just as a human on the planet as an American woman in America. I feel like we're on the precipice of change. I feel a little nervous.
I've never had a sustained period of medication for mental illness when I've not been on other drugs as well. It's just not something that I particularly feel I need. I know that I have dramatically changing moods, and I know sometimes I feel really depressed, but I think that's just life. I don't think of it as, "Ah, this is mental illness," more as, "Today, life makes me feel very sad." I know I also get unnaturally high levels of energy and quickness of thought, but I'm able to utilize that.
I just try really hard to be me, and sometimes that means I'm unfiltered. I try to give people myself because I think making a great product is being in touch with how you feel about things and being able to express things. I really hope I can stay in touch with how I feel about things and I'm able to express that.
I do feel very strongly that this is one of the things which people need encouragement to sort out, because I have this very strong feeling that everybody is probably a genius at something, it's just a question of finding this.
I think the one I'm most proud of as a songwriter is 'Breaking Your Heart' because it was just a different style for me. It was very - I feel like it was very old-timey Patsy Cline. It's got a very '50s feel to it, and I pushed myself to write those lyrics very intimately with my co-writer Ted Bruner.
Things looked funny because my pictures depend on an emotional state... I know this is true and I thought about this for a long time. Somehow it made me feel very, very good.
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