Writing Quotes
-
I didn't always want to act. My passion was writing, and it still is one of my primary passions to this day, but it wasn't until high school when I started acting in plays that it became a thought of something I might want to do. And when I applied to colleges, at NYU, I was able to study both writing and acting.
-
I never started writing because I wanted to write myself stuff. It was really more that I had these stories to tell, and I wanted to work with people that I respected and liked.
-
The writing is a joy, so seamless you nearly miss the sheer artistry of the style and the terrific, wry humour.
-
There is the first satisfaction of arranging it on a bit of paper; after many, many false tries, false moves, finally you have the sentence you recognize as the one you are looking for.
-
Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write more entirely out of yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page.
-
I often give this metaphor where I say that writing short fiction is like surfing, while writing a novel is like navigating with your car. So when you navigate with your car, you want to get somewhere. When you surf, you don't want to get somewhere, you just don't want to fall off your board.
-
I don't really need to appeal to some stockbroker, and I always sort of root for the underdog. I probably consider all that when I'm writing, but it's not in the forefront of my brain.
-
I imagine them very clearly and then attempt to describe what I can see. Sometimes I draw them for my own amusement! (talking about her characters and scenes)
-
Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it.
-
Writing is a deeply spiritual act that can have a profound effect upon the practitioner.
-
Writing is a funny business. You sit in your room and listen to voices and write everything down. What kind of a profession is that?
-
I'm a dreamer. I watch people. You don't try to become them because you could never become any of those guys. But you hope that some of it, you know, comes off on you at some point in your show, some point in your writing, that it happens to you and this light just shines on you.
-
Do not slip into writing for the mind and the mind alone. In other words, do not play merely upon our ability to reason. And do not focus only on visuals. Write for the whole person.
-
The books I'm writing are houses that I build for myself.
Etel Adnan
-
How to feel your way toward something honest, hidden under the trapdoor on the top of your skull.
-
The great thing about revision is that it's your opportunity to fake being brilliant.
-
The most moving parts of 'Real American' come when Lythcott-Haims stares unflinchingly at her own self-loathing, writing about the racist encounters of her childhood that convinced her from a young age that there was something inherently wrong with being black.
-
I don't write political plays in the sense that I'm writing essays that are kind of disguised as plays. I would really defy anyone to watch any of my plays and say 'Well, here's the point.'
-
I aim to write songs in a way that you don't have to have gone to Ghana to relate to it, you really just have to have a heart.
-
Enter the writing process with a childlike sense of wonder and discovery. Let it surprise you.
-
I was totally absorbed in the real world, the politics, the history, the news, and I just couldn't find my way into the fictional world... When I finally could return to writing the novel, it was in fits and starts.
-
Sometimes when I'm writing a superhero story I wonder if they really have to punch each other in the face. Is that really going to solve anything? I feel the same way sometimes when I watch episodes of Law & Order. I'm like, "Yeah, right. You found the sex offender and now everything is fine." TV is big on closure, but I think closure is horseshit in real life. I'm still haunted by stuff I did in my teen years when I think about it too much.
-
A writer must have all the confidence in the world when writing the first draft and none whatsoever when editing subsequent drafts.
-
There is a big difference between being lonely and being alone. I am alone when I write, but I am rarely lonely.
