James Frey Quotes - Page 4

You should at all times be showing a well-motivated character overcoming obstacles in pursuit of a goal.

If I was gonna write a book that was true, and I was gonna write a book that was honest, then I was gonna have to write about myself in very, very negative ways.

I listen to the tick of an unseen clock marking moments of time long passed.

I just started trying to figure out how to write [something] which was unlike anything anybody had ever seen, and once I felt like I had figured that out I tried to figure out what kind of book I could write that would be unlike anything anybody had ever seen. When I started writing A Million Little Pieces I felt like it was the right story with the style I had been looking for, and I just kept going.

Lying became part of my life. I lied if I needed to lie to get something or get out of something

To write a damn good thriller, you need a killer attitude.

I think as an artist or a writer it's OK to want to control your own work.

Words can't say this. The one word love means too little for what it is. It means everything and that is still not enough.

Being an unpublished novelist has about as much social acceptability as being a shopping bag lady.

Ive never had any interest at all in being a journalist or writing some sort of historically accurate autobiography.

The calm. If there is God or something Higher for me it is this. The calm. If there is something that will hold me when I need to hold it is this the calm. There is no anger, no rage, no Fury. There is no want, no need, no desire. There is no hatred no shame no regret. There is no grief, no sadness, no depression. There is no fear. Absolutely no fear. When one lives without fear, one cannot be broken. When one lives with fear one is broken before one begins to live.

I'm just going to write my books and do my work and release it. Let the world decide what it is, and if it's any good or not.

When I was a little boy, Marvin Hagler was my idol. He got no respect for most of his career. His fighting style was straight ahead. He took every shot thrown at him, and he kept punching back 'til he won. I honestly feel that's how I am. I take big shots from people. But I keep going.

I don't want to walk in the middle. I want people to read what I write and feel strongly about it. If, at some point, whatever I am doing is failing to elicit a response, whether it's very positive or very negative, then I am going to stop doing it.

I will not allow people to impose rules on me that don't make sense to me. And I live and work very much outside the literary world and the literary system. What they think and what they believe and what their rules are mean nothing to me.

I'm a writer. I never expected to be recognised on the street. I never expected to get that kind of coverage, good or bad. I never expected to sell as many books as I have.

I'm married, I have a couple kids, I've traveled a lot, I've done book tours a lot, I'm happy to stay home and take my kids to school and come to the office.

I've always said I'm more influenced in what I do by artists, and how they work, how they think, and the freedom they're given to work and think, than I really am by other writers.

I've always wondered what it would be like if the Messiah, or Christ Returned, were actually alive and living in our society; who would that person be, how we would identify them, how would they live and what would they believe in, how would society react to them? I decided to try and tell my idea of that story.

There are no categories in contemporary art. There are no rules. Artists are given the freedom to make and create whatever they please and call it whatever they please. I identify with that system, or lack of system, much more than I do the landscape of contemporary publishing.

But all good things come to an end, often a sad angry miserable end. The cause for such an end can usually be whittled down to one of three things: money, sickness, love lost.

America was first colonized by Puritans. Most of our earliest immigrants, and many since, have come here in order to practice their religious beliefs as they please. Our culture has always been, and will most likely always be, profoundly influenced by religion.

When I was a screenwriter, I was doing it for mercenary reasons.

The Los Angeles Air Pollution Control Board is established in 1946 in an effort to discover the cause of the brown cloud hanging over the city and decide how to combat and disperse it. In 1949, after intense lobbying from both the automobile and oil industries, and against the recommendations and position of the Los Angeles Air Pollution Control Board, the public rail system, which at one time was the largest in the world, and still serves a majority of the city's population, is decommissioned and torn out. It is replaced by a small fleet of buses.

My life is routine. I wake up early in the morning. I brush my teeth. I sit on the floor of the cell I do not go to breakfast. I stare at a gray cement wall. I keep my legs crossed my back straight my eyes forward. I take deep breaths in and out, in and out, and I try not to move. I sit for as long as I can I sit until everything hurts I sit until everything stops hurting I sit until I lose myself in the gray wall I sit until my mind becomes as blank as the gray wall. I sit and I stare and I breathe. I sit and I stare. I breathe.