Writing Quotes

• The writing is really hard. You're alone. It really pulls it out of you. You pull it out of your head. But when you're a director, you're shopping - you're picking this actor, you're picking this scene. It's like the most intense kinetic high-speed shopping of all time. You sit in a chair and it will all come rushing at you like a wind tunnel.

  

  Tony Gilroy
  • Actors
  • Scene
  • Directors

• I just think, as writers, especially with a book that takes years to write, you sort of wake up every morning hoping and praying that you can make it work for the day.

  

  Christopher Bollen
  • Book
  • Morning
  • Praying

• The stranger might laugh and seem to enjoy the writing, but you hug to yourself the thought that they didn't quite understand its force and quality the way you do - just as your friends (thank heavens) don't also fall in love with the person you are going on and on about to them.

  

  Stephen Fry
  • Writing
  • Fall
  • Laughing

• Historical fiction is a collaboration between the time in which it's written and the time that it's writing about and the far future, when we don't know what people are going to think about yet.

  

  Emily Barton
  • People
  • Writing
  • Collaboration

• Honestly, as hard a profession as acting is, I think music is even harder. Acting, you're like a leech, because someone else does the hard part for you. They write it for you, then the director tells you what to do. You really just need to know how to pay attention, follow instructions.

  

  Michael Shannon
  • Thinking
  • Writing
  • Acting

• In Israel, the role of the writer is dictated by the language in which you write. Writers see themselves as cultural prophets.

  

  Etgar Keret
  • Language
  • Roles
  • Israel

• Writing is very castrating in the moment. Fiction in general, it has no function, nobody asks for it.

  

  Etgar Keret
  • Moments
  • Fiction
  • Function

• I'm very selective about what I write about, and whom I write about, and how much I write about somebody.

  

  Cathy Horyn
  • Writing

• The real fear isn't rejection, but that there won't be enough time in your life to write all the stories that you have in you.

  

  Ray Bradbury
  • Real
  • Enough
  • Rejection

• Nothing you write is ever lost to you. At some other level your mind is working on it.

  

  Erica Jong
  • Writing
  • Mind
  • Levels

• I'm really grateful that I could write. But I don't even mind it going on around me.

  

  Carrie Fisher
  • Writing
  • Grateful

• I am certainly a fearful person, but fearless in my writing. So there's that other person inside.

  

  Judy Blume
  • Persons
  • Fearless
  • Fearful

• I've realized that I have a lot of different loves, and I want to pursue writing, but I can never divorce myself from music.

  

  Carrie Brownstein
  • Different
  • Writing
  • Divorce

• Write what's up there." Sister Ignatius pointed at her temple. "As a great man once said, this is a secret garden. We've all got one of those." "Jesus?" "No, Bruce Springsteen.

  

  Cecelia Ahern
  • Men
  • Writing
  • Garden

• The Jungian therapist taught me the difference between the ego and the shadow. I realized I'd been so busy being a good girl that I'd completely detached from my shadow. It's something we all have, and it's where all the creative juices are.

  

  Sue Grafton
  • Writing
  • Girl
  • Creative

• I like things that reach a little further and are a little more abstract, but I don't think that's what I do naturally well. How I write naturally is probably what's furthest from me, and the most removed from what I understand.

  

  Ryan Adams
  • Thinking
  • Littles
  • Wells

• This fear is one of the horrors of an author's life. Where does work come from? What chance, what small episode will start the chain of creation? I once wrote a story about a writer who could not write anymore, and my friend Tennessee Williams said, 'How could you dare write that story, it's the most frightening work I have ever read.' I was pretty well sunk while I was writing it.

  

  Carson McCullers
  • Writing
  • Chance
  • Horror

• I am a dedicated madman, and that becomes its own training. If you can't resist, if the typewriter is like candy to you, you train yourself for a lifetime. Every single day of your life, some wild new thing to be done. You write to please yourself. You write for the joy of writing. Then your public reads you and it begins to gather around your selling a potato peeler in an alley, you know. The enthusiasm, the joy itself draws me. So that means every day of my life I've written. When the joy stops, I'll stop writing.

  

  Ray Bradbury
  • Joy
  • Mean
  • Training

• The effects of MFA programs, and the rise of creative writing instruction more generally, are far more diffuse than people think. Even if you're a writer who has avoided institutions your whole life, you're still going to be reading a lot of writers who have MFAs, and are affiliated with universities.

  

  Chad Harbach
  • Reading
  • Creative
  • Program

• The only thing that makes me crazier than writing is not writing.

  

  Sara Gruen
  • Writing

• Sometimes I claim I write because I put in an application at Sears and they've never called back.

  

  Sue Grafton
  • Writing
  • Sometimes

• Writing a story is kind of like surfing, as opposed to the novel, where you use a GPS to get somewhere. With surfing, you kind of jump.

  

  Etgar Keret
  • Kind
  • Novel
  • Surfing

• Before I had published anything, I still hung out with people who liked to write. None of us had published, so there was no talk about the business, and there was probably a lot more angsty talk back then. But these days maybe there are some more laments about the culture, but I would say no.

  

  Chang-Rae Lee
  • People
  • Writing
  • Culture

• If history moves forward, knowledge of it travels backwards, so that in writing of our own recent past we are continually meeting ourselves coming the other way.

  

  Terry Eagleton
  • Past
  • Way
  • Meetings

1

...

458

459

460

461

462

previous

next