Kevin Spacey Quotes

What I love about doing live theater and the same material night after night is... you can live inside the same words. There comes a great joy in that, in making it so clear because you've had the time to define it.

One of your jobs as a writer is to cut out the noise. All you have is your instincts and your process.

You go through a process of refinement and getting rid of the excesses of your early youth in terms of your excitement about what theatre can do.

Good fiction reveals feeling, refines events, locates importance and, though its methods are as mysterious as they are varied, intensifies the experience of living our own lives.

I never want to dumb it down. If there's any simplification, it's just a simplification to make sure that the reader understands the point that the character is trying to make.

I find in my own writing that only fiction - and rarely, a poem - fully tests me to the kind of limits of what I know and what I feel.

Non-fiction, and in particular the literary memoir, the stylised recollection of personal experience, is often as much about character and story and emotion as fiction is.

Poetry taught me a great deal about language and images, but when it came to plotting, I was stumped. It's been very much a learn-by-doing thing for me.

Finishing books - and leaving the world you've created - is always a kind of emotionally wrenching experience. I usually cry.

The idea that an author can extricate her or his own ongoing life experience from the tale being written is a conceit of very little worth.

My job is to allow the character to live and breathe - and become as real to the reader as he or she is to me.

Screenwriting is like ironing. You move forward a little bit and go back and smooth things out.

I think my experience as an actor helps me to write anything. It certainly helped me to write 'August Osage County.' It helps me to write any play that I'm working on because I think one of the things I do well is write good roles for actors.

When I do my best work, the stories tend to be pretty emotionally-charged.

Every day I run into people who don't know what I do. And even after I explain it they still don't know what I do. So now I can just say, 'Pick up the Locas book!' And that tells them all.

Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

I think it's such a challenge to tell a story, and I think, to be honest, the shorter, the clearer, the better.

Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.

Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists.

I'm always writing across the same themes. But with short stories, I'm doing something different than with novels. In some ways, they're coming from a much deeper place.

People sometimes seem surprised because often, you know, you know, there's a lot of tortured characters in the stuff I write.

After 20 years of writing academic prose and lectures, it seems very familiar and straightforward to me. Writing a novel for the first time, I was reminded of just how difficult it is to figure out how to get this stuff done when you don't really know what you're doing.

You don't have to go fight bulls in Spain like Hemingway to write something great, or go off to war. It's right under your nose.

I think, when I write, one of the things that I'm really attempting to do is I'm attempting to humanize my characters.

I'm a great believer in the novelist being 'on the scene,' reporting, traveling, meeting all sorts of people.