Writing Quotes

• Writing plays for me is often an act of looking at basement-level fears in terms of where they come from.

  

  Stephen Karam
  • Play
  • Term
  • Levels

• Early British pop was helped tremendously by the writing of Bob Dylan who had proved you could write about political and quite controversial subjects. Certainly what we did followed on from what was happening with the angry young men in the theatre.

  

  Pete Townshend The Who
  • Men
  • Political
  • Theatre

• I had to appreciate other things about music, like the writing and the cadence and dealing with producers. I became a student. I wanted to learn the actual idea of what this industry was before I could creatively speak a lot of the things that I wanted to speak.

  

  Dawn Angelique
  • Speak
  • Students
  • Appreciate

• Writing is like hitting yourself on the head with a hammer. It always feels good when you finish.

  

  Ray Guy
  • Always
  • Hitting
  • Hammer

• I don't really wanna think about themes. I wanna just think about the experience of the movie. I feel like, as soon as I reduce it to a theme, once I write that sentence, it won't be that great. I feel like there's more potential for it to mean something interesting if I'm not forcing it to mean something I've already decided.

  

  Wes Anderson
  • Thinking
  • Interesting
  • Mean

• If you're writing a thriller, and you don't make it compelling, then you've really not done your job. So it's easier for me not to set out with certain goals, and then I can't see them as unmet. It's like life generally: If I'm not aiming to be physically fit, then I'm not always thinking about being unfit.

  

  Claire Messud
  • Life
  • Thinking
  • Done

• I am drawn to characters so full of internal contradictions. Idi Amin was one. I loved writing him.

  

  Peter Morgan
  • Writing

• Kitty Kelley's method, already perfected in her unauthorised and unflattering biographies of Frank Sinatra and Nancy Reagan, is to write bestsellers that take what she describes as an 'unblinking look' at their subjects - which might, of course, mean that her eyes are permanently open or permanently closed... the result is a work so bad that Britons cannot realise how fortunate they are in being unable to buy it. The great mistake with this book is not that it has been published in Britain, but that it has actually been published anywhere else.

  

  David Cannadine
  • Mistake
  • Language
  • Realising

• I really like writing heroes who arent necessarily Hollywood handsome. Personally, I think men who are self-confident, intelligent, and funny are outrageously attractive - and my heroines tend to think that, too!

  

  Suzanne Brockmann
  • Writing
  • Heroines
  • Self-confident

• The reason business writing is horrible is that people are afraid. Afraid to say what they mean, because they might be criticized for it. Afraid to be misunderstood, to be accused of saying what they didn't mean, because they might be criticized for it.

  

  Seth Godin
  • People
  • Mean
  • Reason

• Generally, my writing is influenced by living, by absorbing everything that happens to me and my actions.

  

  Graham Nash
  • Writing

• I never thought about writing. I was married young, I was still in college, as we did then, and I had two babies before I was 25, and I loved them, and I loved taking care of them, but I was a little bit cuckoo, staying at home and not having a creative outlet.

  

  Judy Blume
  • Home
  • College
  • Care

• Our problem is this: we usually discover him within some denominational or Christian ghetto. We meet him in a province and, having caught some little view, we paint him in smaller strokes. The Lion of Judah is reduced to something kittenish because our understanding cannot, at first, write larger definitions.

  

  Calvin Miller
  • Problem
  • Understanding
  • Christ

• I began writing with a Michael Buble mentality. I think he's fantastic, and it's the perfect music for any date night, ever.

  

  Joe Jonas Jonas Brothers
  • Music
  • Night
  • Perfect

• I want to write a novel about Silence," he said; “the things people don’t say.

  

  Virginia Woolf
  • People
  • Silence
  • Novel

• You can be far more challenging, articulate and intelligent writing for television than you can writing for the cinema.

  

  Peter Morgan
  • Writing
  • Intelligent

• I've known several cases of writers who decide to write about something and they research the hell out of it and when they're ready to write, they can't move because they are so burdened. I start writing. Whatever I need somehow comes to hand.

  

  E. L. Doctorow
  • Hand
  • Moving
  • Hands

• The one who writes a poem writes it above all because verse writing is an extraordinary accelerator of conscience, of thinking, of comprehending the universe.

  

  Joseph Brodsky
  • Thinking
  • Writing
  • Universe

• When we read our own writing, we all think it clearly expresses what we mean, because when we read it, we are only reminding ourselves of what we had in mind when we wrote it.

  

  Joseph Williams
  • Mind
  • Mean
  • Reminding

• I started writing in the '90s, so I was free to just have an eccentric career and not conform to some idea of what a black writer has to do. I didn't have the burden of representation.

  Colson Whitehead
  • Career
  • Free
  • Black

• Every time I write a song, it's different. I'm all about the rhythm of the words and the melody. Musically, you gotta have a throbbing pulse going. But as far as what it's all about, there's a million ways to go. You have to invent a new code for every song. Then you have to break it. It's like Scrabble or a crossword puzzle on steriods. I could talk about the process for days. But it's never dull and there's no one way in.

  

  Dan Bern
  • Different
  • Song
  • Break

• Writing dark poetry was always my escape.

  

  Bishop Briggs
  • Writing
  • Dark
  • Poetry

• When I decided to stop using quotation marks, it presented technical challenges: you have to conceive of dialogue differently and structure it differently for this to work. So I had a new problem, which makes writing interesting again.

  

  Catherine Brady
  • Interesting
  • Problem
  • Challenges

• You think you have some stable talent that will show no matter what you're writing, and if it doesn't seem to be getting across to the audience once, you can't imagine that moment when it suddenly will. Gradually, gradually you gain that confidence.

  

  Joan Didion
  • Writing
  • Confidence

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