Creative Research Quotes

I don't get a lot of writer's block, because it's all based on research. I just start looking through my notes, and I can write garbage for days - I mean, some of it ends up being good.

I wanted to live the life my characters were living, so I rented a yacht and sailed from Naples to Capri before taking a helicopter back. Got to write the whole thing off as research on my taxes.

Well, the wonderful thing about making movies, oddly enough, is that they're sort of highly motivated graduate studies in one or another field.

I've always been on a quest to use science in an artful way.

Charles Dickens was an avid seeker of names - he read directories and looked for odd names on gravestones.

One of the things I enjoy most about writing historical romance is researching inspiring backgrounds and settings.

For 'The Gift of Stones,' I spent an afternoon chasing a flock of Canadian geese.

In order for me to write a scene, it's very important for me to see and experience everything with my own eyes, so yes, I was able to visit some remarkable houses and destinations while I was in China.

I really write to find out what I know about something and what is to be known about something.

When I was a young person working, everybody was older than me, so I had to kind of keep up. I'd see every movie and listen to everything played, and read all the relevant books. Being an actor, it's kind of your job to know what came before you and how big your feelings are allowed to be.

You definitely want to do the little films. They're always going to be harder, but you don't do them to make money. You do them so you can see what you can make with the research that you have.

I started deliberately looking for characters, ideally outsiders and ideally Americans. So I just started reading widely, as I tell my students to do: read voraciously and promiscuously.

I really hate the term 'historical novel' - it reminds me of bodice-rippers. But I'm hooked on research, and I really, really enjoy it.

I always like when things are loosely based on real events. That always makes it more interesting because there's a lot of research you can do.

I come out of an academic background, and I'm aware that what I'm doing is simultaneously research and fiction. I want to meet both those obligations.

For me, any book I'm writing is also a chance to get in and research and read and learn things that I maybe only knew a little bit about before.

There are people who don't like to use other films as research, but I love it.

Paintings are but research and experiment. I never do a painting as a work of art. All of them are researches. I search constantly and there is a logical sequence in all this research.

I like to find ideas where the research is going to be fun.

I tend to research as I write so that the narrative can take priority, which is important for a piece of fiction, I think, finding out facts as and when I need to.

When there's ever a breakthrough, a true breakthrough, you can go back and find a time period when the consensus was 'well, that's nonsense!' so what that means is that a true creative researcher has to have confidence in nonsense.

The story is everything, so it always begins with a story.And research is a kind of scaffolding built underneath the story as I go along. My enjoyment level varies, but in general, I'm writing about topics I find interesting, so I can't gripe too much.

Paintings don't just happen. I am not a proponent of the idea of an artist as someone who kind of magically makes things and has no real control or isn't willfully producing a certain kind of thing. It is labor-intensive, and it is research-intensive. You are making one decision after another, trying to get at something you think is important.

I don't use the computer. I do sketches, very quickly, often more than 100 on the same formal research.

Research is about following the gleam into the dark. It's also about being sensitive enough to know which fact is "the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders," as opposed to the fact that deadens and kills a delicate new project.