Writing Quotes
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Every actor just wants good writing.
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If I were writing an article for the newspaper, it would be thesis statement, information, information, supporting arguments. That would be the setup. When I'm making a documentary, the pacing of the film and the way that you sort of switch from character to character - all of those are more about storytelling than straight journalism.
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I write plays instinctively. I don't like writing movie scripts.
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I have been writing for 50 years and readers still read my first book from when I was in the Marine Corps.
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In modern novels I try to not let myself get away and to be here, and that's why I write about my life and myself. But even when I do that there's an element of disappearing to a place that's not me. It's "the selflessness of writing". It seldom happens, but when it does it's worth quite a lot.
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Writers don't make good spouses. When I am writing, I'm not a good wife. I shut myself away, and all my emotions are directed towards what I'm trying to write.
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Books and all forms of writing are terror to those who wish to suppress the truth.
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It is popular to believe that in order to see clearly one must believe nothing. This may work well enough if you are observing cells under a microscope. It will not work if you are writing fiction. For the fiction writer, to believe nothing is to see nothing.
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I worked as a carpenter for a few years. I began writing. I wrote a book about my time in Africa - that came out in 1988 - called 'The Village of Waiting.'
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Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south? Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed.
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I often feel that I have a split personality. I love more than anything to be in my study writing, but when it's time to do a book tour, I love that extroverted part, too - talking to people, reading, traveling, going out into the world.
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I always think, when I'm in motion, writing seems like the most natural thing.
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When I'm creating characters, I definitely think of theme songs. Writing for me is very visual, so I sometimes think of it in terms of a movie with a soundtrack, and try to transfer that to words.
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People often say that writing is ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration. This is nonsense, of course. It's pretty much one hundred percent caffeine.
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The writing is just a boring job. It's just a horrible job.
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I get caught up in my bubble of reading, writing, or music.
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Writing is hard, hard work; that's just the way it is.
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You usually find me writing what I like to think of as intelligent summer action and genre films.
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Translation is harder, believe it or not. You do have to come up with a story, and actually I'm mystified by that process. I don't exactly know how the story just comes, but it does. But in writing a story that you're inventing, versus writing a story that somebody else has made up - there's a world of difference. In translation you have to get it right, you have to be precise in what you're doing.
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If you write in the same way over and over again, like, in the same place with the same techniques and with the same people, you're sort of writing the same song over and over again.
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I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.
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Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them.
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When I started writing the screenplay for 'The Queen,' about the aftermath of the death of Princess Diana, both Stephen Frears, the director, and Andy Harries, the producer, begged me not to put Tony Blair in it.
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They were very persistent. They didn't stop writing or calling.
