Writing Quotes
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When you're writing about difficult things and darker issues, it's nice to offer some sort of light at the end of the tunnel. Some sense of hope. Sometimes, the best way to do that is by offering it in the music, so that you can dance your way out of the darkness.
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I probably had something to do with being southern. For some reason, over the last few years I've been much more conscious of that. It's probably because my friend Jack Womack has a thesis that he and I write the way we do because we're southern and we experienced the very tail end of the premeditated south.
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I got into the business because I love writing. When it came down to finding my voice, which every writer has to take time to do, I think I realized I write black people very well. I write us in a very honest way, and I want to hear the way we really talk.
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I've had some success at writing and directing, and I like it. It's infinitely more creative than just acting, and I have things I want to say and do.
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I could not spend the rest of my life sitting in Brazil writing down who called whom uncle and aunt.
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Writing fiction was a way to take the ideas that troubled me or confused me and put them under pressure.
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I was addicted to hacking, more for the intellectual challenge, the curiosity, the seduction of adventure; not for stealing, or causing damage or writing computer viruses.
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I follow only one rule in my writing, and that is to be interesting. If the story is interesting to you, the writer, then it will probably be interesting to somebody else.
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It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.
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I had always written. I had written stories and poems. Then I started writing plays.
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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.
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First rule of writing: When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.
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Directing my own writing, I see that I talk way too much, and everything can happen much sooner, with much less said about it.
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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 people ask that question, it's very hard to nail down a formula or a circumstance that I always write in, but I definitely do believe that there have been moments, musically, when I have channeled something, you know?
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When I stand up from my writing desk, 'John Banville', or 'Benjamin Black' – that is, the one whose name will appear on the title page – vanishes on the instant, since he only existed while the writing was being done.
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I would stay [in the newsroom] until 3 am "in case something happened." But I mostly had nothing to do between 1 and 3 am so I used that time to write. And I chose to write about food and wine. Along the way I carved out a role for myself.
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I'm a simple hillbilly. I don't like eating modern, industrialized, fast food. I grew up eating home-cooked food. So when I'm traveling abroad, like when I recently received a six-month writing fellowship to Iowa in the U.S., I like to cook my own food.
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How thin and insecure is that little beach of white sand we call consciousness. I've always known that in my writing it is the dark troubled sea of which I know nothing, save its presence, that carried me. I've always felt that creating was a fearless and a timid, a despairing and hopeful, launching out into that unknown.
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People, certainly in the U.K., look down on screenwriting as an art form, but I love the discipline of it. Next to the bagginess of novel writing, it almost feels like a martial art.
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I wanted to write when I was young, but people said it was impossible. Then my parents locked me in a mental institution - they said I was crazy and would never make a living from writing.
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You don't have to be as good a writer to write a song; it's a very different process to writing straight prose. To learn how to write prose takes a lot of years of practice.
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What I'm doing is writing stories about women who care about justice. They are women who think about the difference between right and wrong, what's legal and illegal, ethical and unethical, moral and immoral.
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Writing in journalism teaches you to be very comfortable taking criticism, being edited, and rewriting.
