A Quote by David Almond

Then what shall I write? I can't just write that this happened then this happened then this happened to boring infinitum. I'll let my journal grow just like the mind does, just like a tree or beast does, just like life does. Why should a book tell a tale in a dull straight line? Words should wander and meander. They should fly like owls and flicker like bats and slip like cats. They should murmur and scream and dance and sing.
Words should wander and meander. They should fly like owls and flicker like bats and slip like cats. They should murmur and scream and dance and sing.
I was just fooling around with the piano and Todd [Phillips] was like, 'Hey there's a great spot in the movie [The Hangover] where we need a little bit of a breath in the narrative. You should write a song and stick it in there.' And I was like, 'Well, what should the song be about?' And he said, 'The tiger.' 'Oh, okay.' So I went off and I wrote this song. I came back and Todd and I tinkered with it a little more and then we shot it right then. It all happened in a day.
Things like rhyming - it just wasn't falling out of my head that way. So I started to get quite freaked out that I just couldn't write anymore. And then I just kind of went with it, and thought that, "This is the way that my brain's working," in a more direct way, then I should just try it like that for this album. And follow it. Just went with the writer's block, almost - it's a strange thing.
What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore-- And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over-- like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?
I woke up and I just saw all these things, like 'RIP Skai Jackson,' and I'm like, 'Why do people think I'm dead? Like, what happened? Where did this come from?' And then one of my fans told me it was some girl who started it. And for me, that's just like not funny at all.
You didn't plan to write a story; it just happened. Well, it could be argued that the next thing you should do is find a hole to dig. Right? So you start digging a hole and then somebody brings a body along and puts it in. That's what a story must feel like to me. It's not that you say, "I want to write a story about a gravedigger." But you're walking along and "I don't know what I'm doing here in this story,' and - boop! a shovel. "Oh, interesting. Ok, what does one do with a shovel? Digs a hole. Why? I don't know yet. Dig the hole! Oh, look a body."
I'm just very much in love with love. I have this fairy-tale idea of what love should be, and I want it to be magical. I want everything in my life to be magical, actually. If you ever come to my house, you'll see what I mean. I've made it like a fairyland. Flowers and hearts everywhere, and there's colors and little gems hanging from the windows. I just like things to be magical if they can be, and in love there's your opportunity. I think that's how it should be, and if it's not like that, then, "Nah. Don't want it".
And then writing, it was like I just found it, you know? Like you just found your favorite flavor of ice cream, all of a sudden there it is. 'This is what I should have been doing for the last thirty years. What was I thinking?' So I was, then I was in and then I had to just keep going with it.
I definitely go with the flow because I feel like I have been so lucky, and so many things have happened to me that just never should have happened.
I have long argued that no one should be allowed to write opinion without spending years as a reporter - nothing like interviewing all four eyewitnesses to an automobile accident and then trying to write an accurate account of what happened.
I like contemporary American literature and I like biographies and I like jazz and I like baseball and I like writers who write about the human condition and sci-fi is just something that I happened into.
If writing is language and language is desire and longing and suffering . . . then why when we write, when we make shapes on paper, why then does it so often look like the traditional, straight models, why does our longing look for example like John Updike's longing?
In the future, when something comes up, you tell exactly how it happened but write down for yourself the way you think it should have happened. Tell the truth and write the story. Then you won't get mixed up. It was the best advice Francie every got.
I don't even think you should tell the audience you're improvising. It's like an apology in case it's bad : 'we're just making it up' If the improv isn't better than the rehearsed stuff, then you should just rehearse it.
The Universe was a silly place at best...but the least likely explanation for it was the no-explanation of random chance, the conceit that abstract somethings 'just happened' to be atoms that 'just happened' to get together in ways which 'just happened' to look like consistent laws and some configurations 'just happened' to possess self-awareness and that two 'just happened' to be the Man from Mars and a bald-headed old coot with Jubal inside.
If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read? So that it shall make us happy? Good God, we should also be happy if we had no books, and such books as make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. But what we must have are those books which come upon us like ill fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves; like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.
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