“Be more ambitious. Do your homework. There’s no easy way around this.”
“Commercial success and quality are not necessarily allied.”
“You can’t write a character more brilliant than yourself. It’s just not physically possible.”
“Since my student days, I’d been a fan of those books with titles like ‘Great Speeches that Changed the World,’ as I loved the idea that the right person with the right words at the right time could really make a difference.”
“I was born to a very large family, one of 7 kids. I grew up with carnivals and chaos all around me, so I can write anywhere.”
“It’s impossible to make a living in the arts unless you make a fortune. There’s almost no in-between. Writers are either broke or rolling in it. Oddly, you can’t tell them apart.”
“Most writers live in self-imposed exile, even when they don’t leave their country. They prefer the undiscovered country inside their own heads.”
“As you get older, you become more vain. But as your looks slowly deteriorate, your eyesight worsens, so it all balances out.”
“I have three favorite cities: London, Wellington, and Los Angeles. What makes them so good? The friends who live there.”
“Truth is seldom appreciated and never understood, whereas a flattering lie is always appreciated and instantly understood.”
“My routine is to create activities for myself unrelated to writing that allow little time for writing. This means that when I do get the chance to write, it is like a stolen luxury, something clandestine and almost forbidden.”
“Reading is essential to human life. When the last reader dies, humanity will be at an end.”
“No murder or sin or act of barbarism or cruelty has ever been committed by a person fully absorbed in the reading of a book. By this fact alone, we can conclude that readers are nicer people, at least until they put the book down. When we are reading, we are better.”
“At 17, I wanted to be a rock star.”
“The New Zealand sense of humor is tough and realistic. Jokes are not surreal; they are about life and death and tough decisions.”
“If we did not have the impulse and ability to believe in the impossible, we would not have religion, democracy, or marriage.”
“I am so superstitious that I think even discussing this subject is dangerous and will probably bring me terrible luck. Having been raised a Catholic, superstition becomes almost part of your DNA. The challenge is to slowly rid yourself of these little delusions.”
“Life is not a waste of time.”
“When I grew up, my house contained only two books: the Bible and the ‘Edmonds’ cookbook. We were a working-class household. Books were a poor second to the television, which was always on, usually with me in front of it.”
“Before Churchill had done anything else, he was a writer. He believed to the core that words matter. They count. They can change the world.”
“If you look at the copies of Churchill’s speeches that have survived, they are heavily marked up. He was scrupulous about the impact of each word. He preferred short words and the repetition of short words. He knew everything about the techniques of rhetoric.”
“There is the cult of the actor and of the director, and there’s even been the cult of the celebrity chef and gardener, but there has never been a cult of the screenwriter. But I’m happy about that because what I crave – in a completely venal way – is creative opportunities, not recognition.”
“I’m still always surprised that anyone might be interested in my work or me.”
“I still present myself as a New Zealander, answering people’s questions about New Zealand and contributing in my own unlikely way to the global perception that Kiwis can and do fly high.”
“One of the great things about Churchill is that he had the guts to say the unpalatable, to level with the people, even if it cost him politically to tell them the truth.”
“When I was growing up in the ’80s and working in the theater, David Mamet exploded with a whole new reworking of what dialogue should sound like. It was punchy and raw and repetitive, bursting with dynamic. I remember that switching on a lot of lights for me.”
“I often find that writers who disavow the importance of an ending are just not very good at endings.”
“There’s a really fine line between artistic license and artistic licentiousness. And history is a lousy filmmaker. It doesn’t give you all the ingredients you need. No story will quite fulfill that three-act structure.”
“My experience is, the writer I was when I began was only a fraction of what I feel capable of doing now. Don’t stand on that threshold saying, ‘I’m uncertain about my talent.’ You can grow that part of yourself.”
“We’re living in extraordinary times, all the time. The issues that assail us are perennial. They haven’t changed since the Greeks picked up a pen.”
“The people I’m drawn to are sort of self-created. They came from backgrounds where not much was expected of them, necessarily.”
“The more I read about the rules the great orators used, the more I realised, of course, this is how you stir people’s hearts, and you persuade and cajole and move people out of fixed positions. The techniques are quite menacingly easy.”
“It turns out we are all quite easily swayed if someone knows what they are doing – which is a great thing and a dangerous thing.”
“At some point early on, I realized that three of the greatest speeches ever delivered were by Winston Churchill, and they were written and delivered within a four-week period of each other.”
“One of the real ways out of conflict is humour. It builds bridges; it’s a weapon against rigid ideology, narrow thinking, intolerance.”
“If it’s correct to say that there is a closing of minds around the world, story is one of the most powerful agents of reviving the conversation between ideas. Ultimately, that’s all stories are trying to do – open the conversation. They cannot give a proscription. It’s not clairvoyant art.”
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