Writing Quotes
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Novels begin, not on the page, but in meditation and day-dreaming - In thinking, not writing.
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When you're on a staff, it's not your job to write what you think is funny. It's your job to write what the person who created the show thinks is funny.
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Just go outside and look at something and write it down and you'll find it is a very nice piece of writing.
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It really made me nervous to write about it [Holocaust] and to approach it, because I was nervous about how to do it respectfully, and I was also thinking about how I could add something new to something that had already been so explored.
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Nothing teaches you as much about writing dialogue as listening to it.
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'The Fourth Hand' was a novel that came from twenty years of screenwriting concurrently with whatever novel I'm writing.
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Writing teaches writing. Your writing will teach you how to write if you work hard enough and have enough faith.
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I don’t know that liner note writing is a career, especially in this age of digital music, where the deluxe packages that marked the CD era have become ever more rare.
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Editing is work, and it's hard to do while working on one's own writing.
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Elena Ferrante is the author of several novels. There is nothing mysterious about her, given how she manifests herself - perhaps even too much - in her own writing, the place where her creative life transpires in absolute fullness.
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Through Twitter, I've got a writing career and a directing career, as well as hundreds of other beneficial things that have happened to me. I love it.
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Every page was once a blank page, just as every word that appears on it now was not always there, but instead reflects the final result of countless large and small deliberations. All the elements of good writing depend on the writer's skill in choosing one word instead of another. And what grabs and keeps our interest has everything to do with those choices.
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You care a lot about these stories you're writing, and you hope that someone else will care, too.
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If I could write the beauty of your eyes And in fresh numbers number all your graces, The age to come would say, 'This poet lies; Such heavenly touches ne'er touch'd earthly faces.'
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One of the reasons I'm able to write books and still carry on with other work is that I do my best writing between 5am and midday.
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Epithets, like pepper, Give zest to what you write; And if you strew them sparely, They whet the appetite: But if you lay them on too thick, You spoil the matter quite!
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Every time I finish a song... most of the time it's in my own head, like this sounds too much like a Townes Van Zandt song, or whoever. I realize there are so many melodies and chord progressions in pop and rock music that are so similar that you can kind of trace it back to other things. Most of the time it's just in your head.
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I wouldn't care to speculate about what it is in Westlake's psyche that makes him so good at writing about Parker, much less what it is that makes me like the Parker novels so much. Suffice it to say that Stark/Westlake is the cleanest of all noir novelists, a styleless stylist who gets to the point with stupendous economy, hustling you down the path of plot so briskly that you have to read his books a second time to appreciate the elegance and sober wit with which they are written.
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The great thing about revision is that it's your opportunity to fake being brilliant.
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I started writing for the theatre because I hated it.
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I enjoy the process of writing. The torment comes in getting my bottom on the chair and in front of the typewriter.
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My first book was a historical novel. I started writing in 1974. In those days, historical novels meant ladies with swelling bosoms on the cover. Basically, it meant historical romance. It was not respectable as a genre.
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Writing and working with producers is like dating - it sounds strange to say that, but you have to test people out. You have to be like: 1) I like your music. 2) I like you, you're a good person. 3) Let's hang out and see if we can work together. And that is where music comes from.
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You have to remember that writing itself is so solitary. You start writing because you're lonely.
