Chris Avellone Quotes

I didn't do any writing seriously until I was in my mid-twenties. But I've never really thought of myself as doing anything else. I've always wanted to write.

Fiction is very important to me. It's what I do, it's what I do with my life.

All I do is make photos. It's my life.

On my gravestone, I want 'Here lies the singer,' not 'Here lies the T.V. presenter'.

I can't even call it work. I'm a creative-a-holic. I love the tearing into new material.

I've never been in this business to make money. I've always been in it to make good music.

I feel like if I were to play the game completely and just get myself in a giant bottle of nail polish and put myself on display, I would feel like I had somehow cosmically lost. I feel like I'm taking a bunch of the ingredients and using some of them but not all of them and shuffling around and making people think I'm doing my job.

People often ask me if I consider myself to be an architect, fashion designer, or artist. I'm an architect. The paintings I've done are very important to me, but they were part of a process of thinking and developing.

It is decreed by a merciful Nature that the human brain cannot think of two things simultaneously . . .

You know when I think about what I'm doing - what I'm doing and the way I'm doing it is more important to me than any amount of money or anything like that because it's my artistic work.

Painting is my profession, because it has always been the thing that interested me most. I'm of a certain age, I come from a different tradition and, in any case, I can't do anything else. I'm still very sure that painting is one of the most basic human capacities, like dancing and singing, that make sense, that stay with us, as something human.

I think I came alive when I started photography.

I think all musicians should understand that you have chosen not to be a soldier but a musician.

I'm still looking to write a great song.... You always are. You know, you never think, 'Well, that's enough ... that's good enough.'

Every artist would like to live in the central organ of creation... Not all are destined to get there... but our beating hearts drive us deep down, right into the pit of creation.

It is in the blood of genius to love play for its own sake, and whether one uses one's skill on thrones or women, swords or pens, gold or fame, the game's the thing.

From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art.

In a sense, the story, or poem or verse or whatever it is you're writing, you can kind of think of it as a kind of projectile. Imagine it is a kind of projectile which has been specially shaped to be aerodynamic, and that your target is the soft grey putty of the reader's brain.

I realized that carbs are often talked about in a negative context, like, "Carbs make me fat or bloated." But I think for me, I have to have some sort of carb, whether it's rice or pasta or bread or whatever it is, and not big amounts, but I do need carbs because it makes my brain click on.

I think writing would have happened to me anyway, somehow. Differently, but it still would have happened.

Do you know how writers often say the characters take over... But that is more or less what it always feels like to me, too. Even though that's just a way of describing how your brain is working, it's still what you tend to feel.

To me the question is always this: if a ray of light came out of the sky and said, "Your next book will never be published - would you still write it?" If the answer is yes, the book is worth writing.

Writing is nearly always a matter of finding whatever your brain needs to trick it into being creative, and in my case, a tiny little bit of fact just seems to work.

What I really search for is something that I really love hearing, something that's my own private game: If I find a song I really like, I try to do a definitive version.

My mother used to say, "Tell your brain you want that piece of information or you want to solve this problem, and then just walk away from it. Just forget about it. Just do something else, completely distract yourself, and you'll see, it's like a computer. Eventually, it will deliver it up." And I find that's really true.