Writing Quotes
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I was an avid reader, but never thought seriously about writing a novel until I was in my thirties. I took no formal fiction-writing courses and never thought about these categories when I wrote my first novel.
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The average human attention span was 12 seconds in 2000 and 8 seconds in 2013. A drop of 33%. The scary part is that the attention span of a goldfish was 9 seconds, almost 13% more than us humans. That's why it's getting tougher by the day to get people to turn the page. Maybe we writers ought to try writing for goldfish!
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The morning is always my best time of the day for writing because that's when my head is best.
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Revision is the heart of writing. Every page I do is done over seven or eight times.
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I love writing for other actors, women of African descent and people who are generally underrepresented.
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Could we say that the short short is to other kinds of fiction somewhat as the lyric is to other kinds of poetry? The lyric does not seek meaning through extension, it accepts the enigmas of confinement. It strives for a rapid unity of impression, an experience rendered in its wink of immediacy. And so too with the short short.
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As a piece of literacy criticism, Freud's best writing is about Dostoyevsky. It's a kind of displaced literacy criticism.
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I had tried writing novels for many years, and they always escaped me. For a long time, I thought, 'It's just not in me to write a novel. It's not something I'm able to do.' It seemed like everything I wrote naturally ended at the bottom of page three. A picture book, three pages; an essay, three pages.
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And the idea of just wandering off to a cafe with a notebook and writing and seeing where that takes me for awhile is just bliss.
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The writer's job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them.
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I feel as though there are things that I'm trying to do - you know, capturing truthfully some aspect of human experience - and I'm trying really hard not to be fake. And in writing, as in life, it's harder than you think.
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Writing is challenging work because it's so easy to get consumed with how it's going, what's going to happen to it, who's going to like or not like it. You want to get all of that stuff out of your head and just let the work flow.
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Having deadlines helps because people are constantly breathing down my neck, and tapping their toes waiting for pages. So I just have to work nine to five. If I didn't have deadlines then I might be more of a golden hour kind of guy, writing from eight to noon and calling it a day, but that's just not the way I work right now.
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I really love writing, but I am very easily distracted: my two cats fighting, a rainbow, a TV show... I have to use every trick to keep myself at the computer.
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When I started writing it was kind of hard getting people to do my stuff. They' say they couldn't do my style.
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As an author, I had spent years writing my stories on my own in a quiet room. My ideas traveled from my brain to my fingers, executed exactly as I saw fit, never veering from my own intent. TV simply doesn't work that way.
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I'm disregarding all the rules I've seen as people approach writing music. I'm trying to break them.
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Writing has been as difficult for me as for people who don't like to write and as little fun.
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I associated excellence in writing with New York City.
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Creative writing teachers should be purged until every last instructor who has uttered the words 'Write what you know' is confined to a labor camp. Please, talented scribblers, write what you don't. The blind guy with the funny little harp who composed The Iliad, how much combat do you think he saw?
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One of the pleasantest things about book writing is that sometimes it brings one in touch with old friends.
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I don't want to name any names, but I've worked on television shows where there's a guy writing for my generation who's, like, 60 - and it doesn't work.
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I read a quote to the effect that we are always writing about ourselves no matter what we're doing. That may be so.
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I get very frustrated by this term 'genre exercise.' I mean, what exactly is that? Genre is not really relevant when you are writing a song; hopefully you are doing it to explore something, to create something, and I don't agree that any of my albums are genre exercises.
