Writing Quotes
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I booked my first studio at like 12 or 13. Somewhere in that season of my life, singing along with the radio became me wanting to be on radio, you know. And writing Langston Hughes replica poems became me wanting to write like Stevie Wonder.
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I want to thank you, especially those people who are agnostic or atheist. I don't mean any offense by the things I said of the spirit world. Thank you for allowing me to speak about the spiritual, because I can't talk about my life or writing without mentioning that.
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All through my writing life I've had this impulse to write autobiographical works.
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Through lack of education, we're not teaching kids to read and write. So there is the danger that you raise up a generation of morons.
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Painting is marvelous; it makes you happier and more patient. Afterwards you do not have black fingers as with writing, but blue and red ones.
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I've done a lot of collaboration over the years, but right now I'm enjoying writing by myself and just being me again for a while.
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Nobody else in the world would look at writing as craftsmanship - it's totally this Protestant hardworking ethic. You go into this kind of infinite space of imagination and you fence yourself in with all kinds of laws.
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I think when you're writing films that just come fresh out of your own imagination - I think probably anyone who's done that, there are certain themes or styles.
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Whenever I'm writing a book, small details from my life always creep in.
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What difference does it make if you live in a picturesque little outhouse surrounded by 300 feeble minded goats and your faithful dog? The question is: Can you write?
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I don't keep any copy of my books around... they would embarass me. When I finish writing my books, I kick them in the belly, and have done with them.
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I love to play with language; make it do tricks, turn a word inside out to see if it's got a hidden meaning tucked away somewhere, or perhaps find that it's capable of an extra entendre or two. . . . Plotting is nothing I did, or do, naturally. It is the hardest part of the writing process. No matter how many times you plot a script successfully, the next one, representing new and uncharted territory, convinces you that you really don't know how to do it at all.
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If you play Mark Twain and he's not funny, you are definitely not playing Mark Twain. That was the biggest challenge, in some ways. Writing and performing jokes that can come out of that brilliant delivery system he constructed: the friendly, avuncular truth-teller.
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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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I want to fall in love with something in the way I fell in love with the idea of Harry before I write anything else.
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I always believe writing is an indispensable part of one's political armoury.
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Don't write what you think people want to read. Find your voice and write about what's in your heart.
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Writing is hard work: it is like doing homework for the rest of your life. You are always chipping away at it.
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A writer must have all the confidence in the world when writing the first draft and none whatsoever when editing subsequent drafts.
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I hate the phrase “One thing led to another”. What kind of lazy writing is that? Isn't it your job as a writer to tell me how that made this happen? “Adolf Hitler was rejected as a young man in his application to an art school. One thing led to anotherand the United States ended up dropping two atomic bombs on the sovereign nation of Japan”.
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I always love writing about children.
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When I go into a pitch room and I'm pitching something with a writing partner, everybody tends to look at the guy, even if I'm doing a lot of the talking.
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The second person to write a story about a young boy and an escaped slave on the Mississippi wasn't a novelist, he was a typist.
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I believe in not quite knowing. A writer needs to be doubtful, questioning. I write out of curiosity and bewilderment.
