Project Abandonment Quotes

The truth is, anyone can start projects. The world is full of just-started projects that looked great at the time but were never completed.

The best messages in any given negotiation are really implied indirectly, come to the other person based on thinking that you're getting them to do - getting them to get some really solid thought behind their answers. And so a great thing to send someone in an email is, 'Have you given up on this project?'

I kept starting 'Anansi Boys' as a movie and stopping, and eventually wrote the novel and was happy.

The reason 'Detox' didn't come out was because I didn't like it.

'All-Star Wonder Woman' would get worked on in what is laughably referred to as my 'spare time.' I just ended up with less and less time to devote to it. Eventually, we all realized that it was taking forever, so we just all agreed to hold off on it 'til the time was right to do it properly. Well, I still have a contract; DC never tore it up.

I developed that for a long time. I also developed 'Sugar Sweet Science' at New Line and that didn't happen. That was a boxing movie. And between all that there were a couple of other things.

All writers learn this, in time: don't show your work to other people until it's safely finished. Even discussing your unborn book in quite general terms can be such an undermining experience that, afterwards, you give it up and go to live in Guatemala.

They screwed up 'Raise the Titanic!' so badly, I stay away from Hollywood. I won't cheat my readers with another piece of crap.

Abandoning the project was incredibly stressful after having gone through the process of building the room, installing the kiln, collecting the stones, sitting with the kiln day and night as it came to temperature, experiencing the failures.

The criticism is, once I get something flying, I lose interest in it.

I really don't know what happened in reference to 'The Butler.' Mr. Daniels and I had a conversation. I had the script, the email that goes along with it in reference to the character, read the script, loved it. Then I never heard from Mr. Daniels again, and the next I saw was that Oprah Winfrey is now playing the part.

I've got a lot of examples about moments where I thought something would work on film and it didn't work, but I never came to that decision with the film half shot, where I was stuck on a runaway train and couldn't jump off. On those occasions where I have admitted defeat, that this is not going to work, I haven't embarked on that project and made that movie.

I have a few things that I have written over the years that haven't been made, but I sort of feel like there was a good reason why they were not made. So I am not anxious to go back and fix them. I don't have something in the desk drawer that I think, "The time is right now. If I just do this, it'll be great." It is kind of out of sight and out of mind. I am thinking ahead rather than back.

Sometimes they work, and sometimes they just won't. Sometimes you get hung up on them. When that happens, you just throw it back, and maybe come back to it two or three weeks later.

I think I'll not attempt to do a 'Fish Out Of Water 2.'

If somebody had started on a remake of French Kiss before I announced my own film, I would have dropped my subject. If someone else starts after me, what am I to do?

With my first book, I was hired to write a draft of the script. I was so young and less confident. They put me through seven or eight drafts and it was just getting worse and worse, and then the film was never made.

I've had friends who did pilots, and I'd say, 'What happened to that?' and they'd say, 'It didn't go,' and it literally goes into a void of nothingness because no one gets to see it. All that money and talent and time put into it.

You need to know when to surrender the album.

Brazil is strewn with ruins of projects - refineries, power plants - begun but never finished. Most of this investment never landed in places or industries that really meshed with the trajectory of the global economy. This wasn't state-of-the art industrial policy. The projects seemed curiously nostalgic.

Usually, I would mistrust a book if it took that long to write. Usually, if it isn't done in two years, I suspect there's something wrong and throw it away.

We've pitched and even begun development on a number of fantasy worlds that have never seen the light of day. All of those worlds... It's soul-crushing to see them sputter out, one by one. Lost. Like tears. In rain.

I had almost rewritten all of the display code for windows, and that was when I gave up.

Every filmmaker has this short book of films that don't get made - for a whole host of reasons.

I've always juggled a lot of projects because at least half the projects you do get shelved. So you have to do a lot of things in order for things to move forward.