Quotes by Billy Marshall Stoneking

About Billy Marshall Stoneking:

Billy Marshall Stoneking is an Australian-American poet, playwright, filmmaker, and teacher. His son C.W. Stoneking is a musician.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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 is another superstition! If it takes someone like Freud to ...

Billy Marshall Stoneking

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 hidden meaning in it. Even having children is a metapho...

Billy Marshall Stoneking

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 but what you do with it. No one ever developed their ...

Billy Marshall Stoneking

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 not cheap, and it’s hard to come by, owing pa...

Billy Marshall Stoneking

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 dramatic stories, which involves a series of dramatic action...

Billy Marshall Stoneking

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 works from one’s origins, it is the dance of the...

Billy Marshall Stoneking

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

Billy Marshall Stoneking

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 tell your story effectively and leave it out. It mus...

Billy Marshall Stoneking

There’s 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 are somehow significant. But really, it’s not thei...

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, imperfect, unrealised, and by virtue of temporal actions...

Billy Marshall Stoneking

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've lived my life and loved and lost friends and famil...

Billy Marshall Stoneking

Author Bio

  • NameBilly Marshall Stoneking
  • DescriptionAmerican writer
  • BornAugust 31, 1947
  • ProfessionPoet; Playwright; Teacher