Writing Quotes
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Being somebody who's like a theater geek that I am, I can just go right back to Aeschylus and Euripides and Sophocles: they were writing about gods and goddesses versus humans, and how gods could distort, pervert, or help people get what they want.
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I'm way more in my head acting than I am when I'm writing. So there's a weird love/hate on both ends. But writing, as tough as it is, I get so much more out of it. It's like climbing Mt. Everest.
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I got to trumpet, finally. That's why I love to write for brass, and [Count] Basie and [Frank] Sinatra and all that stuff, 'cause that's just like part of my DNA.
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Since I was a child, I've liked telling stories. Maybe because my father's a director, I grew up loving stories. I'm not good at spinning them at a dinner table because I do go on a bit, but I love writing them, and directing is just a way of editing the story.
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The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure pure reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!
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Out of frustration, you do drugs when you can't write. On occasion that might work, but usually what happens is that once you've had on drink, you just want another drink.
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I've been writing since I was 7, but before that, I was orally making stories.
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I was thinking about doing another film at the same time, which was the sequel to Basic Instinct and I just had a feeling that wasn't going to happen. You know, I just kind of read the writing on the wall.
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The first thing you have to learn when you go into the arts is to learn to cope with rejection. If you can't, you're dead.
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I'm a physicist and computer scientist by training. I worked in high tech for thirty years as everything from engineer to senior vice president - for many of those years, writing SF as a hobby - until, in 2004, I began writing full time.
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And when you get an eminent journal like Time magazine complaining, as it often has, that to the young writers of today life seems short on rewards and that what they write is a product of their own neuroses, in its silly way the magazine is merely stating the status quo and obvious truth. The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.
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Here's a slightly outrageous tip: Don't respect the text. Just because you've written something down doesn't mean it has a right to exist. If your internal editor can find a better way to say something, junk the original version and go with the new one. If you can't find a better way, and the passage really isn't good, junk it.
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I got into writing and thinking about politics because I was told there would be no math.
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I fantasize about the networks making a rule that each show's writing staff needs to reflect the gender and racial makeup of its audience.
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My writing is an answer to the partisans of the many and it returns their attack with interest, with a view to showing that the hypothesis of the many, if examined sufficiently in detail, leads to even more ridiculous results than the hypothesis of the One.
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I can write the stuff and play it myself and have something in my head, but the best feeling is when somebody else plays it and they're hearing something other than what I'm hearing.
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It wasn't until I had been writing on and off for maybe ten years that I started to establish any kind of routine, thought I couldn't put a finger on an exact date, and this routine relates simply to the aphorism 'How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.'
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I'm a self-taught musician so how I read music is kind of very weak and I kind of read my own version of tablature, I write my own crappy reminders on what I'm playing.
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All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary-it's just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences.
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Things we write down are the fragments shored against our ruins. They outlast us, these scraps of words on paper. Like the detritus from the tsunami washing up on the other side of the ocean, writing is what can be salvaged.
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I was writing a chapter of Beautiful Evidence on the subject of the sculptural pedestal, which led to my thinking about what's up on the pedestal - the great leader.
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I find writing extremely difficult. I usually have to drag myself to my desk, mainly because I doubt myself. And it's getting harder because I want to improve with every book.
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I always wrote. I've written stories since I was 9. We didn't have a computer at home, but my aunt Magda had one. Whenever I'd go to her place, I was in the basement working on her computer, writing stories.
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My first job was as a groundskeeper at the local ballpark in the town where I grew up. There was a lot of down time, and I got to drive tractor, so it was pretty good gig. I've also taught creative writing, dabbled in reviewing and journalism, and toiled as a screenwriter.
