Writer Quotes
-
I became a script writer with absolutely no idea of how to write a script whatsoever. I still feel a bit of an outsider in that regard. If I can maintain that approach to screenwriting, it can continue to be enjoyable.
Nick Cave
The Birthday Party
-
If melodrama is the quintessence of drama, farce is the quintessence of theatre. Melodrama is written. A moving image of the worldis provided by a writer. Farce is acted. The writer's contribution seems not only absorbed but translated.... One cannot imagine melodrama being improvised. The improvised drama was pre-eminently farce.
Eric Bentley
-
I regretted it. But it can’t be avoided. A writer has to use everything he has. If you want to write, you have to be willing to be a son of a bitch sometimes.
Brian Morton
-
I think as he gets older, Quentin Tarantino is growing more and more into his directorial side, but the writer in him won't stop the pen. I don't think he deserved a directing nod. Like I said, it's beautifully shot - it's cinematography, obviously, deserves a nomination - but he's not the camera man.
Bun B
-
It seems like many people think that if you drive yourself crazy, then you can write. I’m absolutely not interested in that. It made sense to me to be as whole and well as I could be, and as happy. I wanted to see what a fortunate life would produce. What writing would come out of a mind that didn’t try to torment itself? What did I have to know? What did I have to do rather than what can I torment and bend myself into doing? What was the fruit on that tree?
Kay Ryan
-
There are dozens of great American writers who write about the family.
William Nicholson
-
I am practical by nature, and I'd heard that being a writer or an artist is a good way to starve! So I was an economics major at Oklahoma State, and then received an M.S. from Cornell in Agricultural Resource and Managerial Economics. I knew if I wanted to write I would do it on my own, but I knew I wouldn't make myself study economics on my own.
Ally Carter
-
We grow hostile to many an artist or writer, not because we finally come to see he has deceived us, but because he thought no subtler means were required to ensnare us.
Friedrich Nietzsche
-
The only person stopping you from doing something is yourself, and looking for excuses all the time just gets in the way of obtaining your own goals. It's like the writer who keeps getting up and straightening the pictures in the room.
Chrissie Hynde
Pretenders
-
The writer who is a mother should, I think, record everything she can: make notes, keep journals, take photographs, use a tape recorder, and remind herself that there is a subject so incalculably vast significance to humanity, about which virtually nothing is known because writers have not been mothers.
Alicia Ostriker
-
I am convinced that anyone can be a great writer . . . if he can only . . . tell the naked truth about himself and other people. That, a little technique with words and the willingness to bare heart, soul and body are really all it takes.
Clive Barnes
-
Well a good writer writes, a good musician listens to a lot more than he actually composes, and if you're going to do lyrics - well, there's a Freudian slip. That's not even a slip, that's a Freudian move: I said going to do lyrics. If you really want it to ring true, you'll live it first. Go really get your heart broken!
David Lee Roth
Van Halen
-
The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.
Robert Frost
-
Speech is highly elliptical. It would scarcely be endurable otherwise. Ellipsis is indispensable to the writer or speaker who wants to be brief and pithy, but it can easily cause confusion and obscurity and must be used with skill.
Bergen Evans
-
Well, I went to [Hitchcock's] house every day for about three weeks, and I realized that every time I brought up the subject of Mary Deare, he would change the subject. So, I began to suspect that he didn't know any more about how to do the picture than I did. Finally, I went to his house one morning and said, "I've got bad news for you, Hitch. You'll have to get another writer. I don't know how to write this picture." And he said, "Don't be silly, Ernie. We'll do something else." And I said, "But what'll we tell MGM?" And he said, "We won't tell them a thing." And that's how it evolved.
Ernest Lehman
-
John Cheever was the first writer I ever read who sort of had that similar sensation that, you know, life is nasty, miserable, brutish and short, but that occasionally, there's a certain river of light, a kind word, a telling gesture that sort of illuminates something.
Ethan Canin
