A Quote by Stanley Elkin

Writing is an exercise in sculpture, chipping away at the rock until you find the nose.

Stanley Elkin

Quote Topics

Away Chipping Chipping Away Exercise Find Nose Rock Sculpture Until Writing

Quote Author

Stanley Elkin
American - Novelist
May 11, 1930 - May 31, 1995

Making a movie is like chipping away at a stone. You take a piece off here, you take a piece off there and when you're finished, you have a sculpture. You know that there's something in there, but you're not sure exactly what it is until you find it.

Robert Altman

Novel writing, like so many things in life, is an iterative process. You come at it again and again, working at it like you would a piece of pottery or a stone sculpture, chipping away the parts that don't make sense, smoothing over the rough edges.

Kameron Hurley

I really don't have a theme when I start a sculpture. The rock guides me to the final sculpture. I think that is true for many creative sculpture artists.

Jimmy Carl Black

You can't make a sculpture until you've got a lump of rock.

Eran Creevy

I don't know what the sound is or the song is until I've spent a lot of time on it. I'm always chipping away at it, rethinking it.

Adam Granduciel

What we're doing is we're chipping away at what it is to be a woman and to be feminine. And what it is to be a man and be masculine. We're chipping away at that. I wish we could go back to 'Mad Men' days. I love those days. Men were men. And I love them.

Stacey Dash

Until film is just as easily accessible as a pen or pencil, then it's not completely an art form. In painting you can just pick up a piece of chalk, a stick or whatever. In sculpture you can get a rock. Writing you just need a pencil and paper.

Forest Whitaker

Writing is hard work: it is like doing homework for the rest of your life. You are always chipping away at it.

John Lutz

When you're in doubt about the future and you're in doubt about how solid this thing is that you're laying your life and your soul on the line for, you will probably retract into yourself a little bit and think, No, there's only so much I can give to something that everyone doesn't believe in. There's been chipping away, people have been chipping away at it, so it's just you in the spotlight in front of all these people.

Richard Ashcroft

I think of writing as a sculptural medium. You are not building things. You are removing things, chipping away at language to reveal a living form.

Will Self

Until film is just as easily accessible as a pen or pencil, then it's not completely an art form. In painting, you can just pick up a piece of chalk, a stick, or whatever. In sculpture, you can get a rock. Writing, you just need a pencil and paper. Film has been a very elitist medium. It costs so much money.

Forest Whitaker

Here's a secret: fictive text doesn't necessarily flow easily. Most of the time it's more like cutting a highway through a mountain. You just have to keep working with your pick, chipping away at the rock, making slow progress.

Piers Anthony

The landscape everywhere, away from the river, is of rock - cliffs of rock; plateaus of rock; terraces of rock; crags of rock - ten thousand strangely carved forms.

John Wesley Powell

I found I'm quite happy working on a sentence for an hour or more, searching for the right phrase, the right word. I compare it to the work of a stonecutter - chipping away at the raw material until it's just right, or as right as you can get it.