That's always the most productive research - research into tone, into voice. Facts are nice, too, but facts are more raw material than creative inspiration.

Hope is the raw material of losers.

The world is not to be approached, blueprint in hand, as if it were so much raw material waiting to be fashioned to someone's design.

Everything is raw material to me. Land is raw material... I take one form and transform it into other forms.

In a movie, you're raw material, just a hue of some color and the director makes the painting.

Thanks to postmodernism, we tend to see all facts as meaningless trivia, no one more vital than any other. Yet this disregard for facts qua facts is intellectually crippling. Facts are the raw material of thought, and the knowledge of significant facts makes sophisticated thought possible.