Writing Quotes
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We all know that the great memories of our childhood are the little triumphs - it doesn't really matter whether that was in writing, art, on the hockey field or on the football field. It's something that makes you feel - 'I can do this stuff'.
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I began writing fiction because it was the only way to tell all the intricacies of a real-life spy story.
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I had a very high-grade publisher tell me I was incapable of writing a memoir.
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I was writing a contemporary take on Paul's vision of Christ on the road to Damascus, but with a guy driving a Bus load of tourists.
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I think that's great - I just try not to be one of those people. I find the more I think about it, the less free I feel when I write and when I work.
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To be a writer was always my greatest aim. I remember writing a play about Guy Fawkes when I was 10. I suppose it's significant, at least to me, that my first work should be about a historical figure.
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As a child, I had no interest in science whatsoever - then I started writing and recognized how relevant it was. My first book about science and medicine captured the world of organ transplantation in 1989 from the points of view of all of the participants - scientists, surgeons, social workers, organ recipients and even donor families.
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I read everything I could find in English - Twain, Henry James, Hemingway, really everything. And then after a while I started writing shorter pieces in English, and one of them got published in a literary magazine and that's how it got started. After that, graduate school didn't seem very important.
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I didn't really get serious about my own writing until I was convinced it was something that I wanted to do, that I wanted to spend that much time alone.
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The ancient media of speech and song and theater were radically reshaped by writing, though they were never entirely supplanted, a comfort perhaps to those of us who still thrill to the smell of a library.
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There's one massive problem with coming from writing novels into screenplays that I've discovered over the years, which is that you've got too much facility on the page.
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When I went to school, I was already reading and writing. In fact, I was offended that the other kids couldn't.
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I feel a bigger sense of fulfillment when writing a novel, and short stories are more about instant gratification.
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A lot of times, real life is more surreal than writing.
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My youngest son becomes an award-winning nature photographer, and I cannot resist writing poems to his pictures. My daughter loves to cook, though I do not. Yet together, we write a cookbook with fairy tales. And now a second.
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A lot of [George Saunders] early stories now feel prophetic. Take the recent election [of Donald Trump]. Historians in 100 years might write about it as being the first internet election, in which what happened was actually an expression in the real world of a virtual reality. And you've been writing about that subject for a while.
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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 like sitting and writing with my buddies.
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I can't stand it when people say, "If you're writing a novel, you should read this and that." Because it's like giving someone another person's prescription. How do you know that's what they need?
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Eighty percent of a picture is writing, the other twenty percent is the execution, such as having the camera on the right spot and being able to afford to have good actors in all parts.
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For men use, if they have an evil turn, to write it in marble; and whoso doth us a good turn we write it in dust.
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When I started writing I was a great rationalist and believed I was absolutely in control. But the older one gets, the more confused, and for an artist I think that is quite a good thing: you allow in more of your instinctual self; your dreams, fantasies and memories. It's richer, in a way.
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The savants will write excellent volumes. There will be laureates. But wars will continue just the same until the forces of the circumstances render them impossible.
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Writing for the stage is different from writing for a book. You want to write in a way that an actor has material to work with, writing in the first person not the third person, and pulling out the dramatic elements in a bigger way for a stage presentation.
