Zal Batmanglij Quotes

I don't think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer that is as I say demon-driven and wants to learn and has got to write, he don't know why, he will learn from almost any source that he finds. He will learn from older people who are not writers, he will learn from writers, but he learns it -- you can't teach it.

It's easier to write about heartbreak after you've had your heart broken. You have more material to draw from, you can extrapolate from your own experiences and make reasonable assumptions about how your characters would feel and act.

That's the advantage of being a writer: No matter what happens, as long as you survive it, it goes into the work.

The mythology is that from chaos comes great work. I actually used to think that when I was younger, and I no longer think that anymore.

You see one scene shot 25 times in one day, which is totally fascinating, but while you're watching it, you're remembering, 'This is what I was thinking when I was writing that part of the book,' and so it brings it all back very gradually as you're working.

When I had kids, I became a better actor. I just stole from them.

Without fail, the first question I am asked at any author event is, 'Are your books based on your real life?'

I've been pretty lucky in that I'm not a big writer's block kind of person.

For me, filmmaking is not exactly a career. I was never in it for Hollywood or anything. My films are markers of where I am in life, where I am in my head. So that's what I'm working on, and I try to keep things in proportion - life and filmmaking. One feeds into the other.

I wrote 'Black Deutschland' very quickly one summer, probably because I had a lot of it in pieces and fragments sitting around over the years as false starts or notes.

I was a weird kid. It wasn't until I saw 'Aguirre: The Wrath of God' at 16 that my whole world changed. The obsession with that was equal to the obsession with writing.

I've been around many different lives, many different voices. It was amazing material for a writer.

I'm finding writing very fascinating.

I'll be honest: 'Badlands' changed my life: it really did rewire my brain as to how film can operate.

Looking back at it now, it's almost overwhelming, the amount of work that went into writing 'Shine', and to come up with the ideas that we're doing now.

I see myself as an explorer more than a storyteller. A great storyteller, in control of her craft, must be the same person when she finishes telling a story as she was at the start. But I want to be transformed by my filmmaking, by the journey I take.

I knew I wasn't going to write a record as soon as I got signed, because I hadn't had any life experiences. I was still at school, and I wasn't going to write about that.

Nobody will stop you from creating. Do it tonight. Do it tomorrow. That is the way to make your soul grow… The kick of creation is the act of creating, not anything that happens afterward

I don’t have a problem baring my emotions in music. That’s one of the reasons I’m glad to have music in my life. I’m pretty resilient as far as being a human being. A lot of songs write themselves.

I had a lot of time to myself, and I would listen to a lot of music, mostly music that I knew fairly well and had a relationship with. And I'd think, well, what is it that I've never been able to do that this person or people are able to do with this song? Why haven't I been able to do it, and what can they do that I wish I could do? And then I'd try to do that. I'd start each day getting into the songs, and I'd think about how I might get closer to this music that I love, but haven't been able to make before.

Everyone who has ever written will have discovered that writing always awakens something which, though it lay within us, we failed clearly to recognize before.

At this rate, I'd be lucky if I wrote a page a day. Then I knew what the problem was. I needed experience. How could I write about life when I'd never had a love affair or a baby or even seen anybody die? A girl I knew had just won a prize for a short story about her adventures among the pygmies in Africa. How could I compete with that sort of thing?

I am a better writer for having fewer demons, and I am more curious about the world and the people in it. So those of you thinking you might need your demons in order to be creative: I beg to differ.

I needed time to stand back and go through a lot more experience in life. Then I have something to write about, joke or to animate.

Some authors have what amounts to a metaphysical approach. They admit to inspiration. Sudden and unaccountable urgencies to writecatapult them out of sleep and bed. For myself, I have never awakened to jot down an idea that was acceptable the following morning.