Writing Quotes
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If the motive of writing is for some people a kind of exercise in dirty laundry, that's one thing. I've always thought of my poems as meant to be overheard, as I think all of these poems are. It seems to me if you get experience right, even your most painful or humiliating experiences - if you get those experiences right for yourself and make discoveries as you go along and find for them some formal glue - they will be poems for others.
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When you write about animals, of course, you are really writing about the people who love and live with them. Animals mirror and reveal us. Dogs in particular are often reflections of us, and what we need them to be.
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The creative act is like writing a letter. A letter is a project; you don't sit down to write a letter unless you know what you want to say and to whom you want to say it.
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Something I found while writing 'Alice & Oliver' - a book that is unquestionably a work of fiction, but which also borrows details from my own life - is that writing the truth often requires invention and imagination.
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I learned to write by listening to people talk. I still feel that the best of my writing comes from having heard rather than having read.
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So much of writing is done alone in a room in sweatpants, with only the Internet for company.
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I am an advocate of one form of the New Perspective. But there are as many new perspectives as there are people writing about it.
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I thought I was writing for a fairly hip, intelligent crowd; I just thought there were more of them out there. But they're not. They're not out there waiting. They're not gonna use their intelligence on your book.
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I think writing novels has taught me more about the value of patience and being organized. I've learned to use timelines and wikis to track decisions and make sure everything still fits together. It's both easier and harder than writing short fiction.
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When you're in Los Angeles, everybody you meet is writing a movie, and they want you to be in it. Every cab driver is writing a movie!
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When I first started writing the books in the 1980s, all of the female detectives were flawed in some way because they were based on noir characters.
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I write to escape from my life. Writing about men separates 'me' from my work in a way that I find comforting.
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A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.
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The person doing the learning is the person writing the book as much as the person reading it.
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The comforts come from my movie and television writing. It is unusual to live this well simply from books.
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I sometimes suffer from insomnia, and one of the first times it ever happened, I was like, 'I don't know what to do with myself,' so I started writing a song, and by morning, it was finished. It was about how I couldn't sleep... I was 14.
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Then you start another book and suddenly the galley proofs of the last one come in and you have to wrench your attention away from what you're writing and try to remember what you were thinking when you wrote the previous one.
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This motivation was at work in both Christian and non-Christian circles. We know this because ancient authors actually tell us so. For example, a commentator on the writings of Aristotle, a pagan scholar named David, indicated: “If someone is uninfluential and unknown, yet wants his writing to be read, he writes in the name of someone who came before him and was influential, so that through his influence he can get his work accepted.
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I want to get into producing and writing more for myself - setting up my own films and seeing what kind of personal touch I can put on movies, as opposed to just being in them.
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It kills your writing if you try to manipulate it with crude politics.
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The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing.
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If I think of a reader while I am writing, the only reader who really matters for me is my wife. It's most important to me that she likes what I write.
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I write the occasional entry for the 'Times' Theatre blog, especially when I'm in London and seeing two shows a day, but I don't tweet. I don't want to have to express my opinion in 140 characters. That's like writing haiku. You need a certain amount of legroom to review a play properly.
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Writing is busy idleness.
