Writing Quotes
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I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.'
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Comedy is underrepresented in every actor's life, because it's so bloody difficult to write.
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Once you're into a story everything seems to apply-what you overhear on a city bus is exactly what your character would say on the page you're writing. Wherever you go, you meet part of your story.
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If I did not have a de-stresser such as writing novels, I would lose focus at work.
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It is better to be able neither to read nor write than to be able to do nothing else.
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I think people assume that women write about the domestic sphere. Women write about relationships and family. Men do, too, but then it's the Great American Novel.
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With writing, I can express myself, really, and share my ideas and just let my thoughts flow out.
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Writing is not a serious business. It’s a joy and a celebration. You should be having fun with it.
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When I write something simple I'm always really proud of it. When you write something that simple with that much air in it and the whole premise behind it is something pretty obvious - that everybody wants to be happy and free - the song is sort of an exercise in not forgetting that's what you really want and what you really need. We can get caught up in a lot of other stuff.
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The aim of my writing is to utterly remove the distance between author and reader so that the book becomes a sort of semipermeable membrane through which feelings, ideas, nutrients pass.
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I've discovered I prefer to prepare a few notes or actually write the speech so I can really hone it down to hopefully be entertaining, try and get a laugh at least by the second line, and then say what you need to say.
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When you're in the middle of writing a song, you can come up with this whole web of stuff only you know how to get through. That's very entertaining for me to do that.
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I was writing short films and I was going through this really, really, really terrible end of a relationship that I didn't want to be going through. It was too much for me to process and all of a sudden I had this idea for my first feature film and I knew right away I had to start writing it.
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Marches work, rallies work, civil disobedience works, direct action works, voting works, writing letters works, speaking to churches and schools works, rioting works.
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Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.
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Writing is a long and lonesome business; back of the problems in thought and composition hover always the awful questions: Is this the page that shows the empty shell? Is it here and now that they find me out?
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Writing cannot express all words, words cannot encompass all ideas.
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I seem to write an opera about every 20 years; if you live long enough you can write four operas. I finished my third in 1970.
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I like to use a bit of chaos when I shoot. I think it may be something from the way I shot my first film - I was very scared, of course, and I prepared everything, I wanted to make sure that the characters did the right thing at the right time on the storyboard. But then I realised that in life, there is so much more than what you can predict or write in advance, that when you shoot the story, it's good to leave some gaps where you lose control. I think this combination of chaos and organisation gives a kind of quality.
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The difficult part of writing about someone you don't admire is that it's easy to demonize them. What you get then is a cackling villain, twirling their mustache at every dastardly deed they commit.
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The way to write well is to live intensely.
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Sometimes a song can take up to a year to write, and because I waited that year and waited to work on it that day, it came up that extra 50 percent.
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No blur of inexactness, no cloud of vagueness, is allowable in good writing; from the first seeing to the last putting down, there must be steady lucidity and uncompromise of purpose.
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Writing was a chimney for my blazing ambitions.
