Rebecca Miller Quotes

I was 100 percent sure when I left university that I was going to be a painter.

We all have to embrace the idea not to be worried about there being other women in the room. Gay men work with such solidarity.

I was always very curious about other people. I would always stare and my mother would say - just please close your mouth!

One of the things that's good for me is that I can go from one art form to another.

I've always been fascinated by the way that children and animals suffer stoically in a way that I don't think adults do.

The quality of life decreases with heightened security.

She's a mystery, a cipher, something nearly extinct these days: a person not controlled by ambition or greed or a crass need for attention, but by a desire to experience life completely and to make life a little easier for the people around her

I am half-Jewish, and yet really hadn't been brought up within the Jewish faith. So I had felt culturally Jewish, if that's possible, without really understanding it.

Writing is still a bit of a miracle - the whole process: I see the world, filter the world, write down abstract squiggles on a page which somebody is then able to connect with. I'm still amazed by it and think I always will be.

I think one of the great joys of being a writer is you can transcend everything, even your own sex, what century you live in, and how you think. I found it quite natural to think as a male because I actually think that as a female, one often thinks in the mind of a male in terms of eroticism. You think about what the other person feels. So it's not that hard to imagine being that person.

I had a lot of great lakes of ignorance that I was up against, I would write what I knew in almost like islands that were rising up out of the oceans. Then I would take time off and read, sometimes for months, then I would write more of what I knew, and saw what I could see, as much as the story as I could see. And then at a certain point I had to write out what I thought was the plot because it was so hard to keep it all together in my head. And then I started to write in a more linear way.

Deirdre Maddon has an extraordinary, almost celestial way of telling a story. There are so many great writers now - although I also want to go back and read all of Dickens again.

Every milieu has something ridiculous about it - film-making, the music world, painting - because people who take themselves seriously become funny pretty quickly.

Writing is a particular kind of frustration, which is why when I was making the structure for the novel I visualized it for myself with a color-coded board so I could see it.

I was an anorexic, beer drinking, class cutting, doodling, shoplifting, skater chick that was into nature, art class, and the beach.

Ambition can be a disease, and it feeds on itself.

I'm fascinated by what makes up a self, how one becomes a self, how much is it an answer to others and how much is it an essence of self.

I would have started writing a lot earlier if I hadn't been [Arthur Miller's daughter].

Novels have become equally important to me as films. I consider myself a storyteller and passionately engaged in both of those disciplines.

As much as there are intellectual choices to be made and all the rest of it, a great actor has the ability really, to disappear and lose themself in a kind of mystical fashion. My appreciation and fascination with true acting is really all over the book, definitely.