Rebecca Miller Quotes

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

Nobody is so weird others can't identify with them.

The quality of life decreases with heightened security.

In a way, a lot of my work is in the re-writing once it is cast, as I adapt to the rhythms of how the roles are played out by the actors.

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

I don't like getting patted down and taking off my shoes at the airport.

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

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

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

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

Looking at paintings was a huge part of finding my way into the lush world of the 18th century.

Every work coming from the creator is about getting the demons out, and each character in those stories had a different personal crisis to get through.

That's one thing I find about having children - it does unlock a door that separates you from other women who've had children.

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

I never had any desire to become a well-known actress.

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.

It is really hard when the actor you pictured can't do the film.

At best, I think of a director as a magnet. You get all the metal fillings in all the individual actors and crew, and get those filings moving toward your magnetic direction.

There is a magic thing called 'tone' in a film, that the director must master and maintain.

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

Writing is acting in the sense that you're imagining and inhabiting another. In the book I was trying to get at the root of what true acting is.

As if there's a world that exists that you're semi-privy to yet can't quite penetrate - that's how it feels when you're starting a book.

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.

The script is the musical score, and everyone has to play off that score. Even I have to interpret it. The producers are there to eliminate obstacles to that interpretation.

I was interested in the mystical element of humor - was humor part of creation? Is God laughing at us, or with us?

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

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.

I have a great drive to make things and sometimes I forget to slow down a little.

You work with each individual actor as you perceive their needs to be. It's something that you've figured out in the weeks of pre-production.