Writing Quotes
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I write about violence as naturally as Jane Austen wrote about manners. Violence shapes and obsesses our society, and if we do not stop being violent we have no future. People who do not want writers to write about violence want to stop them writing about us and our time. It would be immoral not to write about violence.
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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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It's a very dull thing to watch, a writer at work. So dull that whole casts of characters show up just to watch the boring writer writing.
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Around the time I dropped out of college, I decided to start taking what I liked about short stories and apply it to writing songs - to make these things that would change and keep going.
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TV critics, who traditionally hate television and make their living writing about it, often didn't like what I did on the air.
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I get invited to do panels with other Brooklyn writers to discuss what it's like to be a writer in Brooklyn. I expect it's like writing in Manhattan, but there aren't as many tourists walking very slowly in front of you when you step out for coffee. It's like writing in Paris, but there are fewer people speaking French.
Colson Whitehead -
If I wrote in Jacob Riis' time, I'd be writing about teeming slums in our cities and kids dying of tuberculosis or outhouses in Philadelphia or kids losing their toes because they were living in homes without heat. He took on a battle in 'The Battle with the Slums' - and we won.
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Around age 18, I decided to start writing my own stuff. I wrote some bad short films and shot them. I tried to make them better and better. I slowly learned how to make movies, and I think I'm still learning.
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There are writers I return to no matter what I'm working on, writers like the South African J.M. Coetzee. He has an ability to make you feel that he is writing for you alone.
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What is the use of writing plays, what is the use of writing anything, if there is not a will which finally moulds chaos itself into a race of gods.
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In my writing, I focus lenses. I'm almost always seeing when I am writing.
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Try and write straight English; never using slang except in dialogue and then only when unavoidable. Because all slang goes sour in a short time. I only use swear words, for example, that have lasted at least a thousand years for fear of getting stuff that will be simply timely and then go sour.
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I fantasised about F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby' - I loved it, and then I read everything J. D. Salinger had to offer. Then I was turned on to Kerouac, and his spontaneous prose, his stream of consciousness way of writing. I admired him so much, and I romanticised so much about the '40s and '50s.
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One of the things that put me off writing for a while was that piece of advice everybody gives new writers: 'Write what you know.' Nobody would ever want to read about my boring life! But I do know a lot of things about different societies' cultures and mythologies. The way people were and are.
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I'd like my writing to be recognized with a Grammy.
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I don't work at being ordinary.
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I think that it's worthwhile to explore the ways in which you write the person that's writing your plays as opposed to simply assuming that it's all a natural process and there's no design in it. Because your public persona is designed, to a certain extent, and you can have fun and profit at various times doing that.
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I start with an idea that is no more than a paragraph long, and expand it slowly into an outline. But I'm always surprised by the directions things take when I actually start writing.
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I was very involved in political satire, and I'd been writing parody for 'Mad' and 'National Lampoon,' so I made up some strange story about Gerald Ford.
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My cure for writer's block is to step away from the thing I'm stuck on, usually a novel, and write something totally different. Besides fiction, I write poetry, screenplays, essays and journalism. It's usually not the writing itself that I'm stuck on, but thing I'm trying to write. So I often have four or five things going at once.
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My writing flows out of my doctorhood. They are not separate things. They are one. I think the foremost connection between being a doctor and being a writer is the great privilege of having an intimate view of one's fellow humans, the privilege of being there and helping other people at their most vulnerable moments.
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It's just a matter of writing the kind of book I enjoy reading. Something better be happening at the beginning, and then on every page after, or I get irritated.
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I've had the idea since high school, of writing music just for voices, just a choir. I don't know if I'll ever get around to doing it, but I'd definitely be excited about trying to pull that off at some point. It definitely seems like an older-me kind of project.
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I've been writing long enough to know that fiction, as a rhetorical mode, works very differently from expository writing. If an author has a specific critique about contemporary society in mind, fiction tends not to be the best means to deliver that critique.
