I never saw myself as a director. It's certainly a second language but making movies for 40 years, you pick stuff up. However, this style of making movies, this documentary style, is easier for me because I gather a lot of material and with an editor, write it on screen. You try to write based on what you shot.
there was no crime in unconscious plagiarism; that I committed it everyday, that he committed it everyday, that every man alive on earth who writes or speaks commits it every day and not merely once or twice but every time he open his mouth… there is nothing of our own in it except some slight change born of our temperament, character, environment, teachings and associations
GOOSE, n. A bird that supplies quills for writing. These, by some occult process of nature, are penetrated and suffused with various degrees of the bird's intellectual energies and emotional character, so that when inked and drawn mechanically across paper by a person called an "author," there results a very fair and accurate transcript of the fowl's thought and feeling. The difference in geese, as discovered by this ingenious method, is considerable: many are found to have only trivial and insignificant powers, but some are seen to be very great geese indeed.
So how can a poet-an intelligent, serious poet-write mystical verse now? The poetry of Adam Zagajewski provides the beginning of an answer to this question.
In general I do not draw well with literary men -- not that I dislike them but I never know what to say to them after I have praised their last publication.
When I'm writing, I am trying to find out who I am, who we are, what we're capable of, how we feel, how we lose and stand up, and go on from darkness into darkness.
A person writing at night may put out the lamp, but the words he has written will remain. It is the same with the destiny we create for ourselves in this world.
I write description in longhand because that's hardest for me and you're closer to the paper when you work by hand, but I use the typewriter for dialogue because people speak like a typewriter works.
I only write to understand myself better... I don't try to show how intelligent or how cultivated I am, I just try to share my soul. Sharing is part of life.
Writing is hard work, and if anything's true about the process, it's that fact that a good story is hard to find and even trickier to get on paper. What's less romantic than staring alone at a blank screen? And edgy? I've changed the cat little because I didn't know what my characters were going to say next.
So we have a choice to make. We can once again let Washington's bad habits stand in the way of progress. Or we can pull together and say that in America, our destiny isn't written for us but by us. We can place good ideas ahead of old ideological battles, and a sense of purpose above the same narrow partisanship. We can act boldly to turn crisis into opportunity and, together, write the next great chapter in our history and meet the test of our time.