Writing Quotes
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When you're writing fiction, you're in every character 'cause you can't help it.
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Writing is work. It takes a lot of contemplation, concentration, and out-and-out sweat. People tend to romanticize it, that somehow your work appears by benefit of some mystical external force. In reality, to be a writer, you have to sit down and write. It's work, and often it's hard work.
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The timing for directing is usually because it takes that long to develop a piece and then do pre-production and then post-production. It takes at least a couple of years. I prefer directing to doing other things. Directing and writing seem to be infinitely more creative
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I started writing because I wasn't getting things as an actor.
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I myself am pursuing the same instinctive course as the veriest human animal you can think of - I am, however young, writing at random - straining at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness - without knowing the bearing of any one assertion, of any one opinion. Yet may I not in this be free from sin?
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There's more to research than just looking up facts. Eventually, you have to make subjective calls. If you're writing a science fiction novel, there's probably some speculative technology in it. You'll have to decide how to project existing technology forward in a plausible way.
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I worked in videogames for 16 years before writing my first book in 2009.
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The major newspapers simply stopped writing about me, and my voice could no longer be heard on radio or television.
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There is nothing - nothing - like writing a great joke and having that joke kill onstage.
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I grew up in southern Africa but was born in England, so my family was afflicted with the stiff upper lip of the British. When coupled with the violence we saw as children, that can be a fatal combination. Fortunately, I have an outlet for trauma in my writing.
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People spend a lifetime thinking about how they would really like to live. I asked my friends and no one seems to know very clearly. To me it's very clear now. I wish my life could have been like the years when I was writing 'Love in the Time of Cholera.'
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Lack of romance is my real objection to writing on a computer.
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The business of writing a novel is a long, meandering road into the self, into the imagination. And it's a road the writer travels alone.
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The people who are writing online and the people in my genre of creative non-fiction exert a great deal more freedom that journalists are allowed to exert in their day-to-day work.
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I think, when I'm 73, I'm going to be getting softer, writing Hallmark cards, losing my teeth.
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After I left the Pumpkins, I went home and just sat around. I have a studio in my basement, and I found myself writing all these songs, just taking advantage of the relaxed situation. I wrote about 30 songs in about 30 days.
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I had never read Upton Sinclair. I didn't read 'The Jungle' in high school or anything like that. But it's pretty terrific writing.
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Literature at its fullest takes human nature as its theme. That's the kind of writing that interests me.
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To me, the pinnacle of my career is writing for youth. I can die happy: I have succeeded in doing what I have always wanted to do.
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To be a good director, you have to spend a lot of time on actual sets, but today, there's a lot of people who spend a lot of time in dark rooms writing a script, and they'll go in and tell the story to some suit at a studio who says, 'Okay, this is great, let's go.' But that doesn't necessarily mean you know what to do once you're on set.
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Morality is often seen as an innovation, like agriculture and writing. From this perspective, babies are pint-sized psychopaths, self-interested beings who need to be taught moral notions such as the wrongness of harming another person.
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The best way to tell people about climate change is through non-fiction. There's a vast literature of outstanding writing on the subject.
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There is sometimes a feeling in crime fiction that good writing gets in the way of story. I have never felt that way. All you have is language. Why write beneath yourself? It's an act of respect for the reader as much as yourself.
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If you're a writer, the insight of other writers - if there's some kind of Holy Grail message on how to deal with writer's block or how to deal with any problem that can come up - whether you're writing about yourself or a group of people, I find that very interesting.
