Writing Quotes
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It’s not just the adage ‘write what you know,’ it’s about gathering up all of the knowledge and experience you’ve collected up to now to help you dive into the things you don’t know.
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Now that I'm staring down the barrel of the last act of my life, I'm less excited about control and solo effort, and I resent the way the business aspects interfere with my space for creative writing.
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There's an attitude that I have where I bring the art to the table and the writer brings the writing to the table, but neither of us brings the story to the table. The story is something that only happens with the combination of both of us.
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I'm very excited to work with everybody on 'The Bridge' - the cast, the writing staff, the executive producers - the show is really good. I'm very lucky to be a part of it.
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'E.T.' was the movie that made me want to make movies in the first place, and it was the first movie that made me focus on writing instead of what happens in the movie.
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Most memoir writers will tell you that the hardest part of writing a memoir isn't what to include, but what to leave out.
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Creative writing and shooting are muscles that atrophy. But when you work them, you become a self-generator who can branch out.
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When I'm writing a book, sentence by sentence, I'm not thinking theoretically. I'm just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I've got.
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Always write your ideas down however silly or trivial they might seem. Keep a notebook with you at all times.
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The more restrictions you have, the easier anything is to write.
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I wrote a book of essays about New York called 'The Colossus of New York,' but it's not about - you know, when I'm writing about rush hour or Central Park, it's not a black Central Park, it's just Central Park, and it's not a black rush hour, it's just rush hour.
Colson Whitehead -
There are so many opportunities in life, that the loss of two or three capabilities is not necessarily debilitating. A handicap can give you the opportunity to focus more on art, writing, or music.
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In prose, you have a lot more room for digression, for very meaty kinds of dialogues. In graphic novels, you're writing haiku-length dialogue. Your job is to be efficient, to get out of the way of the art.
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We went through this business of me writing out all the parts for these old songs from Gravity and Speechless and we'd been performing that, but we don't do that any more.
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Writing for TV entails saying every dumb idea that comes into your head to a room of people. And doing so with the confidence that it doesn't make you look like an idiot.
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I'm not an emotional person; I keep it in, and I wouldn't know how to get it out if it weren't for acting and writing.
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I don't write songs apart from theatrical pieces. I'm not interested in writing songs qua songs.
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At the end of my first year, I realized I wanted to do more drama, so I actually started an extracurricular course outside of university. So I was at school all day writing, and in the evenings I'd go to drama school. So it was nonstop.
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I worry that people think you have to go to a university to be a good writer, which is categorically untrue. I don't think I learned how to write at Oxford. I did not go to any creative writing classes or anything.
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No honest writer today can possibly avoid being influenced by Freud through his pioneering work into the Unconscious and by the influence of those discoveries on the scientific, philosophic, and artistic work of his contemporaries: but not, by any means, necessarily through Freud's own writing.
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I've had students at Yale: my main task with them in drama school was not helping them with their writing but showing them how valuable they were. Because they're ready to give it up and go into teaching or television.
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For me, writing is a love – hate relationship.
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A writer who isn't writing is asking for trouble.
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Anyone who works in the arts knows, if you're writing a novel or a play or anything, you have to be ready for someone to say, 'Your time is up.'
