Writing Quotes
-
One of the things about what . . . I do - writing plays - is that a poll is not taken before you say, Well, I'm going to write this because I think that you're going to like this and therefore you'll buy a ticket for this.
Wendy Wasserstein
-
We have the crime of the century every six months. So for people like me who enjoy, you know, taking these stories and writing about them, the material is endless.
John Grisham
-
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.
Aleksandar Hemon
-
It can get a little costly if you try and leave it until then to write songs. But you're writing all the time. You're collecting songs. I've had songs that have been collected over a two-year period for my next record.
Keith Urban
-
A PhD in Mathematics is three years of guessing it wrong, plus one week of getting it right and writing a dissertation.
Keith Devlin
-
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.
Chang-Rae Lee
-
For me the writing, when I'm going to direct it myself, is really just the first draft, and I don't change it very much; I only change it on average about two lines per movie.
John Sayles
-
The problems that other writers encounter are so fascinating to me as a writer and as a thinker about writing. I have found that many times, my students are experiencing problems that I myself have experienced in my work, but the solution is different because they're different people.
Emily Barton
-
Learning to write is learning to think. You don't know anything clearly unless you can state it in writing.
S. I. Hayakawa
-
I love writing but don't get a huge amount of time to do it.
Lennie James
-
I'm in a profession with a dismal success rate, in an academic field with a dismal hiring rate. And I don't write, really, about any of that - rather the institutional structures I've negotiated my way through, with healthy doses of luck, provide a breathing, parasitic glimpse into the bureaucratic monolith of the creative-degree machine.
Davis Schneiderman
-
I try to get a feeling of what's going on in the story before I put it down on paper, but actually most of this breaking-in period is one long, fantastic daydream, in which I think about anything but the work at hand. I can't turn out slews of stuff each day. I wish I could. I seem to have some neurotic need to perfect each paragrapheach sentence, evenas I go along.
William Styron
-
I probably haven't had enough gay characters in my stuff. When you're writing something, you're thinking, 'Why couldn't this person be black, white, gay?'
Martin McDonagh
-
My first attempt at writing a novel was horrible. I had to throw it away. But I stuck with the idea, which is what became 'The Invisible Circus.'
Jennifer Egan
-
I've been writing fiction since I was a kid. From the age of 15 to 25, I probably wrote more than 50 short stories, one of which was published in 'The Paris Review' in 1989.
Amor Towles
-
Novels set in distant places give us expectations not unlike those we have of travel writing, and often the distinctions are blurred, as in, say, the way the low life of Tokyo's Shinjuku Ward is depicted in John David Morley's recent 'Pictures from the Water Trade.'
Darryl Pinckney
