Writing Quotes
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Irish fiction is full of secrets, guilty pasts, divided identities. It is no wonder that there is such a rich tradition of Gothic writing in a nation so haunted by history.
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The thought, when written down, becomes less oppressive, but some thoughts are like a cancerous tumor: you express is, you excise it, and it grows back worse than before.
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I think, as writers, our first responsibility is to writing an honest story. Tell the story you want to tell, without pulling your punches.
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I've been writing 'Green Lantern' for a long time, and one of the reasons I've enjoyed it is because the depth of stories you can tell is pretty endless with space and everything.
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Read. Read. Read. Read many genres. Read good writing. Read bad writing and figure out the difference. Learn the craft of writing.
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I hope people find my movies funny and will watch them years from now. And, in terms of writing, I hope that something remains that will not seem old-fashioned, that will still have a vibrancy to it 50 years from now.
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My name became a brand, and I'd love to say that was the plan from the start. But the only plan was to keep writing books. And I've stuck to that ever since.
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I am always thinking about writing music; my wife is constantly asking me: 'Is there any way you can turn off the music part of your brain for a minute?' but I really can't! It's my form of therapy.
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I love the physical act of writing as well as how I grow which each situation I put on the page.
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Writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy and freedom.
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Night-time is when I brainstorm; last thing, when the family's asleep and I'm alone, I think about the next day's writing and plan a strategy for my assault on the blank page.
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A decade in advertising exposed me to plenty of schemers and backstabbers. But honestly, advertising is wonderful training for fiction. Writing novels is much easier if you've ever tried to write a billboard.
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The idea that writing about characters of another race requires a passage through a critical gauntlet, which involves apology and self-examination of an almost punitive nature, as though the act of writing race was somehow morally suspect, is a dangerous one. This approach appears culturally sensitive, but often it reveals a failure of nerve. I believe the demand that we ought to reveals a species of fascism within the left - an embrace of political correctness with its required silences, which has left people afraid to offend or take a stand.
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Poetical feelings are a peril to scholarship. There are always poetical people ready to protest that a corrupt line is exquisite. Exquisite to whom? The Romans were foreigners writing for foreigners two millenniums ago; and for people whose gods we find quaint, whose savagery we abominate, whose private habits we don't like to talk about, but whose idea of what is exquisite is, we flatter ourselves, mysteriously identical to ours.
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I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.
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I jog in the morning and then write for about two hours. There are times when I'm really excited and can't wait to get back to it. But there are days when I don't know what's coming next, and I really have to force it.
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As an actor, my main focus is finding good writing and attacking a good role.
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When I'm writing fiction I'm thinking, God, this is so hard - I have to make all this stuff up! I wish I were writing a nonfiction book where all the facts are laid out and I don't have to be so much at sea.
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I prefer poems that occupy an imaginative sphere. When I lived in Cincinnati, I was occasionally referred to as an "Ohio Poet;" this made me uneasy, not only because I think of myself as a generally American poet but also because I like to think I write out of the country of my own mind.
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Anybody can do research. The plotting of the novel, writing the ending before you write anything else, which I always do - I don't know that everybody can do that. That's the hard part.
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You have to write a book because you believe it has helped you, because you believe it has helped others personally and you are dying to share with it others because you know it will add value to their lives. You write it for them like a gift. You don't want anything from them. You don't want them to do anything for you. You don't even care if they all share the book with their friends, they don't all have to buy them. You're just dying to share this idea with people. Your challenge is to write it in a way that is compelling, enjoyable to read so that they will get the idea.
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I never enjoyed writing a book more; indeed, it is the only one I remember in no sense as a labor but as a joy.
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When I first started writing, I was in advertising at the time, I was doing most of my writing on weekends. I had studied most of the other series heroes and I figured it would be fun for mine to be different and put him in and around water. So I dreamed up Dirk Pitt.
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Write. Enjoy writing. Then, and only then, worry about the business end of it. Start loving your hobby, and then you can't go too wrong.
