Tony Earley Quotes

The primary urge that motivates and engenders writing...is the writer's desire to invent and tell a story, and to know himself. But the more I write, the more I feel the force of the other urge, which collaborates with and completes the first one: the desire to know the Other from within him. To feel what it means to be another person. To be able to touch, if only for a moment, the blaze that burns within another human being.

The only reason to write is from love.

That's one of the great thing about writing is that you get to be in someone's head.

The best ideas are those that really affect me emotionally - those are the ones you never forget. You think to yourself, 'I want to write that book', for years; those are the ideas that I love to work with, and 'The Bone Garden' was one of them.

I'm drawn to roles because they excite me intellectually and emotionally.

I love literature deeply. I view books as sacred things, and in writing my story, I'm going to do my best to honor the form that has played such a huge part in shaping who I am.

For me writing and acting all comes out of the same place, a compulsion to review and connect to something. For me they are more similar than different.

The best thing about being a writer is it gives you readers who understand your deepest feelings and fears.

My most successful books, the ones that I feel the strongest about, are the ones that started with a premise that for me was deeply emotional.

Everyone has a book inside of them - but it doesn't do any good until you pry it out.

I really love to set things in places that are real to me.

I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to say something about home.

Writing has always been an interest of mine, and 'The Language of Flowers' combined my experience with foster care with something I've always wanted to do.

Books are mind reading devices; they allow us free access to the thoughts and dreams of people we have never met.

I love to write. I have always loved writing. That was my first love.

As a writer, when you fall in love with a place, you want to spend more time in it, either physically or mentally, and so you write about it.

I'm not an actor because I want my picture taken. I'm an actor because I want to be part of the human exchange.

I only want to tell films that I really feel passionate about telling.

I've had so many experiences with film or musicals or books where I just walk away changed in some way. One of the things that makes me want to be a writer is to pour my heart into something and hope that I can affect someone in that same way.

Every piece of writing I've done has been something where I feel like I need to get this out of me, whether it's a seed of something personal or an anxiety that turns into a play or an image that's in my mind and haunts me that I'm trying to investigate.

You get attached to places, you know. Like people, I suppose.

Writing is like the relationship with your bowels. First you can, then you can't. Finally, you must. Only then should you reach for the paper.

It's the stories that make my heart beat faster ...those are the ones to write about

I think that usually I'm just drawn to something that's different from something that I've done previously. Whatever makes me feel something. Whatever makes me excited and connected to it.

Picasso says that an artists paints not to ask a question but because he has found something and he wants to share—he cannot help it—what he has found.