Best quotes by Don Roff
Don Roff
Writer and filmmaker
Don Roff (born December 13, 1966, in Walla Walla, Washington) is a writer and filmmaker.
Roff grew up in Milton-Freewater, Oregon. He worked at the local drive-in theater and made Super 8 mm and VHS movies with his neighborhood friends. He graduated from McLoughlin Union High School in 1985. Roff joined the United States Army in 1989 and became a US Army Ranger. He was stationed at Fort Benning, Georgia in the 3d Ranger Battalion, and was a part of Operation Just Cause in Panama. He graduated from Walla Walla Community College in 1995 and The Evergreen State College in 1997. After living in Seattle, Washington and New York City, Roff returned to Walla Walla, Washington in 2011. In June 2006, Roff received the Zola Award for screenwriting from the Pacific Northwest Writers Association.
Don Roff quotes by category:
FearFear and self-doubt are the deadly enemies of creativity. Don’t invite either into your mind.
It's my belief that people enter your life at exactly the right time.
But people in a small town tend to do a lot of talking, even when they don’t know what they’re talking about.
Regarding the creative: never assume you're the master, only the student. Your audience will determine if you're masterful.
Always mystify, torture, mislead, and surprise the audience as much as possible.
Nothing's a better cure for writer's block than to eat ice cream right out of the carton.
A writer always writes.
If you treat your characters like people, they'll reward you by being fully developed individuals.
Writers often torture themselves trying to get the words right. Sometimes you must lower your expectations and just finish it.
A day of bad writing is always better than a day of no writing.
Nothing says work efficiency like panic mode.
There is no right or wrong way to write a novel. Each journey is different for every individual work and for every writer. The first error is never to begin; the second is never to finish.
When you print out your manuscript and read it, marking up with a pen, it sometimes feels like a criminal returning to the scene of a crime.
Any conversation including the mention of Roald Dahl, Ray Bradbury, or Emily Dickinson is one worth getting into or at least eavesdropping.
Love it when a compelling new character kicks open your mental door, tracks mud across your brain, and props their feet up on your cerebrum.
Write about the thing that scares you most or your most private confession and you'll never have a problem coming up with decent fiction.
Authors must spend months, years making fantasy believable in a single work while reality runs rampant and complete chaos elsewhere.
Writing a story, regardless of length, begins always with a single word.
It’s hard to land a devastating jab/cross/hook/uppercut combo to your reader’s imagination when you’re telegraphing your punches.
When you're writing what you love, it's the most fun you can have with your clothing still on, unless of course, you write naked.
Always work with/surround yourself with people who help make you a better version of you. Kindly avoid those who don't.
A migraine is the cockblock of writing.
If you focus on the humanity of your stories, your characters, then the horror will be stronger, scarier. Without the humanity, the horror becomes nothing more than a tawdry parlor trick. All flash and no magic, and worst of all, no heart.
You can be a writer who doesnt read everyday. But youre not fooling anyone. It shows, rather embarrassingly, in your work.