Margery Allingham Quotes

Actually, I get a little say in what my character would or wouldn't do.

I'm one of those writers who, when writing, believes she's god-and that she hasn't bestowed free will on any of her characters. In that sense there are no surprises in any of my books.

In a way, the characters often do take over.

I wanted to express myself more fully through writing and directing. It just feels like a package deal. Anytime you create anything, you try to exert mastery over your world.

I don't write books inadvertently.

As much as I really like the screenwriting thing, the novel is where the author has so much control.

The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim; he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.

I don't have to do anything. The character is shaped on the page.

Directors don't always create, they can also destroy with too many demands.

Occasionally, on screen, Barbara [Stanwyck] had a wary, watchful quality about her that I've noticed in other people who had bad childhoods; they tend to keep an eye on life because they don't think it can be trusted. After her mother was killed by a streetcar, she had been raised in Brooklyn by her sisters, and from things she said, I believe she had been abused as a child. She had lived an entirely different life than mine, that's for sure, which is one reason I found her so fascinating. I think her early life was one reason she had such authenticity as an actress, and as a person.

The writing is the most important bit, and performing it is just closing the circle because I'm less likely to screw it up than anyone else.

If only you’d remember before ever you sit down to write that you’ve been a reader long before you were ever a writer. You simply fix that fact in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read if he had his heart’s choice. The next step is terrible, but so simple I can hardly believe it as I write it. You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself. I won’t even underline that. It’s too important to be underlined.

You have more and more people coming into the tent with the creative guys [on Hollywood films]. You have marketing and concept testers, advertising people. What you find gets the high numbers is easily appealing subjects: a baby, a big broad joke, a high concept. Everything is tested. The effect is to lessen the gamble, but in fact you destroy a writer's confidence and creativity once so many people are invited into the tent.

I realized than an author cannot also be a producer.

Of course it's super special to create your own records; it really is a part of my self.

The worst thing you can do to anybody trying to be creative is to demand participation in their vision.

Writers get to stay with the piece. They don't just turn the script in and somebody else takes it over and goes out and produces it and edits it and all that stuff. We stay with the piece all the way through.

You have to make sure you have the characters you want. That's really the most complicated part.

My thumbprint is on every single thing that happens with Hellboy. It was the hardest thing I ever had to do professionally, letting someone else draw the main Hellboy comic. He's so much mine. But I still have no intention of ever handing over the writing of the main Hellboy comic to someone else. That character is my baby.

I have no idea who the characters are, later, their personalities take over anything I might want to do. I end up writing not from my own will, but from theirs-they come alive as I write and make me do things that I couldn't have planned.

In art, there is one thing which does not receive sufficient attention. The element which is left to the human will is not nearly so large as people think.

I don't create the movies I'm in. When it comes to music, it's my clothes, it's my guitar, it's my voice, it's my song.

The good thing about writing books is that you can dream while you are awake. If it’s a real dream, you cannot control it. When writing the book, you are awake; you can choose the time, the length, everything. I write for four or five hours in the morning and when the time comes, I stop. I can continue the next day. If it’s a real dream, you can’t do that.

Writing is too hard not to do exactly what you want to do. It's a very draining and agonizing process for me, and I don't want to live with any piece of work that I don't believe in completely. I have to believe completely in what I'm doing. It has grown organically out of my own experience.

I assure you that there's a lot involved in compositions with figures. ... It's like weaving... you must control and keep an eye on several things at once.