A Quote by Robert Gottlieb
There are a few writers whose lives and personalities are so large, so fascinating, that there's no such thing as a boring biography of them - you can read every new one that comes along, good or bad, and be caught up in the story all over again.
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I would give them (aspiring writers) the oldest advice in the craft: Read and write. Read a lot. Read new authors and established ones, read people whose work is in the same vein as yours and those whose genre is totally different. You've heard of chain-smokers. Writers, especially beginners, need to be chain-readers. And lastly, write every day. Write about things that get under your skin and keep you up at night.
As an author, you think you know where the good parts and the bad parts are. And then you read to a group of children, and you learn when you're boring them, and you hurry through those sections to get to the parts where they're interested again. You start to get a sense of your story's rhythm and flow.
I stopped reading William Faulkner because it's hard work. I want to read a good writer, but I also want to read something where the pages are going to move along. That's what I want. It doesn't have to be a thriller or a mystery. Just something where I get caught up in the story.
Like stories, people have individual lives, and are all caught up in this murky thing. All of them have the best intentions. In that sense, you could just as easily tell the same story from another character's perspective. Maybe that's a good idea for a TV series.
The story being told in Star Wars is a classic one. Every few hundred years, the story is retold because we have a tendency to do the same things over and over again.
Some writers just write about their own lives. Well, I don't want to do that. I want to have a really boring life. A quiet, boring life so no one wants to write a biography. I'm the only writer in history only to have one wife, for instance.
Words are alive--when I've found a story that I love, I read it again and again, like playing a favorite song over and over. Reading isn't passive--I enter the story with the characters, breathe their air, feel their frustrations, scream at them to stop when they're about to do something stupid, cry with them, laugh with them. Reading for me, is spending time with a friend. A book is a friend. You can never have too many.
In my films, I like to use the same actors again and again, so I know them really well and can bring their unique personalities into the process. However, as a director, I have strict control over the way they express their personalities. I don't want them to go beyond what I need from them, but I also don't want them to underplay. So I modulate their performances very closely, within a certain range of expression.
The number one thing I look for is personality. For me, the personality of someone makes them more and more attractive over time ... and for those with bad personalities, less and less attractive. I look for honesty, intelligence, kindness, and a good work ethic, to name a few.
Reading has always brought me pure joy. I read to encounter new worlds and new ways of looking at the world. I read to enlarge my horizons, to gain wisdom, to experience beauty, to understand myself better, and for the pure wonderment of it all. I read and marvel over how writers use language in ways I never thought of. I read for company, and for escape. Because I am incurably interested in the lives of other people, both friends and strangers, I read to meet myriad folks and enter their lives- for me, a way of vanquishing the “otherness” we all experience.
God uses millions of no-name influencers every day in the simplest selfless acts of service. They are the teachers whose names will never be in the newspaper, pastors who will never author a book, managers who will never be profiled in a magazine, artists whose work is buried in layers of collaboration, writers whose sphere of influence is a few dozen people who read their blogs. But they are the army that makes things happen. To them devotion is its own reward. For them influence is a continual act of giving, nothing more complicated than that.
The thing about acting is even if you get technically more skilled at what you do, every time you begin a film or a play you're terrified. You don't know if you're going to pull it off. Every film and every story has its own set of challenges. I've never felt like, oh yeah, that's it, nailed it! You can never sit and rest. That's why it's such an exciting job. It's beginning again every time you begin again. New story, new character, new place, new time, new director. It's like moving to a different planet and trying to figure out how to live there.
New writers seem to pop up from everywhere. And quite a few of them are really good and original.
There's this sense of being strange, which is at the heart of every creative person. Every writer, every actor, every director knows who Ripley is. We've made careers and lives out of pretending, making things up, inhabiting other people's stories and lives. That's what I do every day. . . . The story is so audacious and subversive: a central character who behaves badly and isn't apparently caught. That intrigued me no end.
I wish I could take back every interview. Over and over again, I read them later, and either I'm misquoted or I said something stupid. I'm just not very good at it.
I've read every Madonna biography. I've also looked up every pop star to see how they first made it. The biggest thing I learnt was that you have to be pro-active. You can't be scared.
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