Writing Quotes
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David Mamet was great to work with. He was everything that I thought he would be as a director. He's incredibly articulate, an easy collaborator. Extraordinarily knowledgeable about film and writing.
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No, I've never competed. I did, however, train in a boxing gym with a good coach beginning in 1993. I'd been writing about the sport for a dozen years by then and wanted to know what boxers endured, what it felt like. I was too old to compete when I started, but I sparred enough to get a taste.
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Sean Penn, for his acting as well as his writing and directing. There are so many actors I respect, but his reach is so wide.
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I think being an only child created in me a degree of self-reliance, which I'm glad of. It made me perfectly happy with my own company and perhaps was good conditioning for the protracted solitude of writing books as slowly as I do.
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When my works are being translated, I always get this question from my translators: Up or down? Which means, should it sound biblical and highbrow, or should we take it all down to sound colloquial? In Hebrew, it's both all the time. People in Israel would write in a high register, they wouldn't write colloquial speech. I do a special take on colloquial speech.
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I've been interested in autism since I've known about it, which is more or less since I've been writing.
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When I worked in theater, I was always writing things on Post-it Notes and sticking them on screens or desks. Twitter has given me a way of continuing to post those notes, only a lot of other people see them, too.
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I believe in the future a new Dante will write a new Divine Comedy.
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Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl.
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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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I am a businessman at the end of the day. I have grown up with Excel sheets. I start out writing my novel with spreadsheets and the milestones in each chapter highlighted.
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I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing what you really felt, rather that what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things which produced the emotion that you experienced.
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The best writing is not about the writer, the best writing is absolutely not about the writer, it's about us, it's about the reader.
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The pleasure of writing fiction is that you are always spotting some new approach, an alternative way of telling a story and manipulating characters; the novel is such a wonderfully flexible form.
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The process of writing and creating and answering that very unique call inside yourself has nothing to do with agents and sales and all that stuff.
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Older teens tend to write to me and say, 'Thank you for not writing down to teenagers.'
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I am interested in politics but have stayed away from writing overtly political songs, or message songs, because I find it difficult to discuss politics intelligently in a 4-minute song. But I am finding there are ways to get bits and pieces of political thought across without preaching that the people have the power or we shall not be moved. Of course these sentiments have their place too - I'm not knocking Phil Ochs - but that's a different kind of music, songs to play at rallies, not to achieve a state of bliss.
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Parents spend a lot of time talking over kids. My son went through a vocabulary burst as I was writing 'The Bear.' I thought, 'What if I just stopped and listened?'
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It is so much hard work writing your first novel. You're not even sure that it is possible to do.
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Mostly singing was cathartic, writing was cathartic, therapeutic. I don't think I had a goal, particularly, to sing or put it out there for anybody.
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When Truman Capote wrote from the perspective of condemned murderers from a lower economic class than his own, he had some gall. But writing fiction takes gall.
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I've experienced being properly lost in my desires, and it's really influenced my writing.
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It's the feeling of being lifted out of my life into another world that is the thrill of writing fiction.
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Easy reading is damn hard writing. But if it's right, it's easy. It's the other way round, too. If it's slovenly written, then it's hard to read. It doesn't give the reader what the careful writer can give the reader.
