A Quote by Woody Allen

When I first started, there were writers that I looked up to that I felt very influenced by and very respectful toward their work and their opinion of my work. — © Woody Allen
When I first started, there were writers that I looked up to that I felt very influenced by and very respectful toward their work and their opinion of my work.
I have a very dear friend, a great painter, called me up very upset, the work wasn’t going well… He asked me to come to his studio -- which I did -- I looked around at the work, dozens of sketches, drawings, large pictures, and I was very close to his work, intensely involved with his work, and he asked me, ‘What’s wrong?’ And I said, ‘Simple – it’s a loss of nerve.
I think I felt that I was very well known for my figure and needed to keep that up for my work. And I regret all of it. I felt fraudulent and very shameful.
It's interesting how many science fiction writers get going when they are very young. I was on a program with Greg Bear and he mentioned that he had gotten started writing when he was eight. And I began writing when I was 10. I think we're influenced by the stuff, we find it and we love it and we're influenced by it....I know I collected my first rejection slip when I was 13, and I went on collecting them for a long time after that.
At first, we lived in very, very small places... with my mom cleaning houses and scrounging up just enough to keep us in town with a working car. She introduced me to my first agent, and I started with stand-in work, then eventually commercials and television guest-shots.
A lot of work was done with one of my best friends and editor, Spencer Averick, who's edited everything I've ever made from the very, very first documentaries; the very, very first films I made were docs, so we learned the form together.
I know the guys in Metallica. I'm very honored that they were influenced by Deep Purple when they started, and they've always been very kind to us.
I did not support any more New York. I lived 10 years there, and after September 11, I felt very European. I did not share the opinion of people in the street, who were deeply influenced by what they heard in the media.
I was a very nice boy. I was well-educated ... very Catholic family. So I was very respectful, never late at work. I was always the last one to leave. It's always been that way in my life.
When I attended the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965, I was very inspired. The collaboration of many poets from these alternative traditions - though there were not enough women - who were very much more influenced by, say, Asian forms or by Mantra or by thinking politically through their work in deeper ways really stuck with me.
I felt very maternal around eight months. And I thought I couldn't become any more until I saw the baby... But it happened during my labor because I had a very strong connection with my child. I felt like when I was having contractions, I envisioned my child pushing through a very heavy door. And I imagined this tiny infant doing all the work, so I couldn't think about my own pain... We were talking. I know it sounds crazy, but I felt a communication.
John Dos Passos, Raymond Carver, Flaubert and William Maxwell were all very influential when I first started writing. Now, the writers I'm most interested in are the writers who are most unlike me: for example, Denis Johnson.
The first time I had work in a public space it felt very strange to see people that I didn't know looking and, and presumably commenting on, my work. Nowadays, I'm a bit more fatalistic - they either like the work or they don't and there's not a lot I can do about that. The trick seems to be not to get too pissed on open nights so that I can answer any questions without making a fool of myself. Doesn't always work!
When I started, there were very few women at the managing director level and very few who had families, which is something that was important to me. So it's not like, when I looked up, I could say, 'Well, that's who I want to be.'
The e-book does seem at the moment to threaten the livelihood of writers, because the way in which writers are paid for their work in the form of e-books is very much up in the air.
A lot of times, my work is looked at very much on the surface. It's very easy to just want to put something in a box - to say, 'Oh, since this work deals with surface desires at times, this is about consumerism.' And of course, the base of the work is... not about economics at all.
My father worked in a factory and as a child it felt very secure. It felt very secure because everybody had work, the schools were free, so there was a security of knowing that the war had finished and families would come together again.
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