Quotes by Billy Marshall Stoneking

“No matter how cleverly we disguise our anxieties they bear witness to the imperfect nature of the human heart. To be is to become. To become is not to be. We are a work-in-progress, incomplete, imp...”

“A mistake is the name we give to any action in which we perceive a difference between what we intended and what has occurred. Intention fuels every dramatic action, including the writing of dramati...”

“Originality has nothing to do with producing something new - it is about seeking the source, the primordial ground from which you draw and have always drawn your being. It comes about when one wor...”

“My dear woman, our greatest problem is that almost everything is a goddamned code. We do not know what is real any more. Every gesture is symbolic. A man cannot shit short of some pundit finding hi...”

“Character is not purchased with a dance in the street. It's expensive and hard to come by. Though it is the heir of disappointment, betrayal and frustration, it is not the inheritance that matters ...”

“Poetry is the struggle against the simplification, codification, and mummification of language, it serves as a constant redirect - moving us to the experience to which the words point.”

“Fear is elemental to every human endeavour involving risk and change, which includes ALL creative endeavours. To be creative is to be anxious. To endure the anxiousness - to face it and work with i...”

“No one ever developed their character by arranging their experiences in such a way that only good things are allowed to happen to them. Character is not purchased with a dance in the street. It is ...”

“THE THINGS POETS & WRITERS DO THAT I LOVEListen to the AncestorsAcknowledge their influences Trust their gut-feelings and act on themMaintain openness. Play Dance with languagesBe bold Refuse servi...”

“We speak for those who cannot speak. We have a duty to tell the stories for those who do not have the advantages that we have to tell stories. We must not speak falsely. The stories that we are ent...”

“Nothing that happens is meant to happen or not meant to happen. The meant is the story we tell ourselves that allows us to make sense of what is fundamentally senseless. Does this make our lives le...”

“Theres a chasm between writing about yourself and writing about your personal life. A lot of young writers want to turn their lives into stories, into films, books, because they feel their lives ar...”

“As a screenwriter - if you are completely honest with yourself - you cant help but admit that your greatest threat is the audience, where audience is not understood as a demographic category but as...”

“Too many film schools, as well as any number of screenwriting gurus and an obscene number of how-to-write tomes, have made a business of catering to fledgling screenwriters and filmmakers by exploi...”

“The story writes you as much as you write it. And the process of re-writing isn't so much a quest to re-write the story as it is to re-write the writer.”

“Some writers might tell you that writing is like a piece of magic - a process of creating something out of nothing, and I guess I used to think about it that way too a long long time ago. But as I'...”

“Your audience is your adversary. If you don't have one get one - imagine it. Imagine it now. To whom is your story addressed and why? Audience is always a creative act of the imagination. You can't...”

“As a writer, you cant get to where you want to be, coming from the place you started, unless you have something extremely important you want to say to someone who really doesnt want to know.”

“The answer to the question, 'where's the drama?' is another question: 'what's the problem?”

“POUND We spend twelve hundred generations developing so-called civilization to the point where it produces an expert who can offer us salvation from our superstitions, and all we end up with ...”