Writing Quotes
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I'd always wanted to write something about the Korean War because of my heritage. My father lost his brother during the war, and I fictionalized that episode, which was told to me very briefly without much detail.
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Writing a first draft is like trying to build a house in a strong wind.
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I actually do write very emotionally, because it’s not going to make it out of the rough draft process if I’m not moved by the premise of what I’m writing.
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George Orwell is a pinnacle writer, for his combination of moral insight and literary writing.
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There is a lot of censorship about writing that's exerted from all directions, from families or governments and society, even the fear of being offensive in some way.
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Writing is what I do. It's like breathing to me at a certain point, but if I couldn't write, I do like cooking.
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When you think about being a director, you think about writing stories, putting the camera in interesting places and directing the actors to get your vision, but it's hard to imagine even this process... sitting here nine months later talking about the film and talking about it 20 times in one day. You don't even think about the part where you come to the set every morning and everyone's looking at you to see your mood in order to see what the day is going to be like, and the influence that you wield.
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Photographers direct the eye toward a particular object. We who write, one hopes, are directing the heart and the soul.
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I consciously decided to make both 'Sammy's Hill' and 'Sammy's House' more of a warm satire and not go the route of writing a dark and bitter book about D.C.
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I would recommend that any writer get off their ass at least once and just try it. Directing is a completely different set of muscles. It also affects your writing because, once you start directing, you tend to write your scripts with directing in mind.
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I always wanted to write fiction. Always. As far back as I can remember it's been integral to my sense of myself - everything else was always a displacement activity.
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If our writing is worth anything at all, then we have to put ourselves into it.
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I do bring my teaching together with my writing. I make students write in class, and do the same prompts I give them. I'm always on the lookout for teaching poems - poems that inspire me and my students to write poems in response.
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Smart people often talk trash about happiness and worse than trash about books on happiness, and they have been doing so for centuries - just as long as other people have been pursuing happiness and writing books about it.
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What is a modern poet's fate? / To write his thoughts upon a slate; / The critic spits on what is done, / Gives it a wipe - and all is gone.
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In short, I do not write for mathematicians, nor as a mathematician, but as an economist wishing to convince other economists that their science can only be satisfactorily treated on an explicitly mathematical basis.
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Yeah, at home it's all moonbeams and puppy-dog tails, so I guess I do have a darker side - and I like writing about it.
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I approach writing stories as a recorder. I think of my role as some kind of reporting device - recording and projecting.
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I wrote a book. It sucked. I wrote nine more books. They sucked, too. Meanwhile, I read every single thing I could find on publishing and writing, went to conferences, joined professional organizations, hooked up with fellow writers in critique groups, and didn't give up. Then I wrote one more book.
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The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement - if you can't deal with this, you needn't apply.
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It's often women who are writing leading roles for women. Most of the stuff that comes my way is not actually about women. I'm just asked to be a supporting player in a story about a man, and I, frankly, was not interested in doing that.
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The Puerto Ricans forming the ranks of the gallant 65th Infantry on the battlefields of Korea … are writing a brilliant record of achievement in battle and I am proud indeed to have them in this command. I wish that we might have many more like them.
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Writing, at its best, is a lonely life.
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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.
