In this post, you will find great Writing Quotes from famous people, such as Marjane Satrapi, Naomi Alderman, Woodrow Wilson, Amy Lee, Corey Taylor. You can learn and implement many lessons from these quotes.
Graphic novels are not traditional literature, but that does not mean they are second-rate. Images are a way of writing. When you have the talent to be able to write and to draw, it seems a shame to choose one. I think it’s better to do both.
Writing is investigation.
My biggest dream from the beginning – besides Evanescence – is scoring film and writing music for film.
All writing is a form of manipulation, of course, but you realize that a plain sentence can actually do so much.
I like writing idealistically, romantically and swashbucklingly.
There’s always pressure, a great deal of pressure, when writing, since my first books were so successful.
Book sales and teens reading is always a fantastic thing, but we should also be celebrating and consuming the huge wealth of U.K. and U.K.-based writing and illustrating talent. Authors such as Charlie Higson, Darren Shan, Holly Smale, Tanya Byrne, Catherine Johnson, Sophie Mckenzie, to name but a few.
Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer’s own life.
Having listened to great songwriters like James Taylor and Carole King, I felt there was nothing new that was coming out that really represented me and the way I felt. So I started writing my own stuff.
I really think that if there’s any one enemy to human creativity, especially creative writing, its self-consciousness. And if you have one eye on the mirror to see how you’re doing, you’re not doing it as well as you can. Don’t think about publishing, don’t think about editors, don’t think about marketplace.
When I’m writing fiction, I read nonfiction or biographies. Now I’m watching very old movies or old foreign films. I don’t immerse myself in whatever’s going on in whatever area I’m working in.
The most important thing when you study hypnosis is that you learn that humans are irrational. Until you understand that, hypnosis is hard to do… For me, it was this great awakening to understand that humans are deeply irrational, and it’s probably the greatest influence on me in terms of my writing.
I take my laptop everywhere with me, and I will write on long journeys. I will write sitting in my hammock in the middle of the rainforest. When everybody else is chilling out after filming, I am usually writing!
The pleasure of writing fiction is that you are always spotting some new approach, an alternative way of telling a story and manipulating characters; the novel is such a wonderfully flexible form.
Writing nonfiction, you’re responsible to posterity, to history, to other people because the events happened, and you feel responsible to record them as they happened.
I’m more comfortable writing traditional protagonists. But ‘Steve Jobs‘ and ‘The Social Network’ have antiheroes. I like to write antiheroes as if they’re making their case to God about why they should be allowed into heaven. I have to find something in that character that is like me and write to that.
No honest writer today can possibly avoid being influenced by Freud through his pioneering work into the Unconscious and by the influence of those discoveries on the scientific, philosophic, and artistic work of his contemporaries: but not, by any means, necessarily through Freud’s own writing.
I don’t understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It’s very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.
Writing, overall, has never been what I’d call fun. It’s fulfilling. It doesn’t come real easy for me.
I’ve always preferred writing about grey characters and human characters. Whether they are giants or elves or dwarves, or whatever they are, they’re still human, and the human heart is still in conflict with the self.
Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.
I write everything with fountain pens. I don’t know why. I’ve done it since I was bar mitzvahed. I was given a fountain pen, a Parker fountain pen, and I loved it, and I’ve never liked writing anything with pencils or ball-points.
Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.
There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily.
All my early books are written as if I were Indian. In England, I had started writing as if I were English; now I write as if I were American. You take other people’s backgrounds and characters; Keats called it negative capability.
I’m very shy really. I spend a lot of time in my room alone reading or writing or watching television.
I’m happy to work until I’m 70 if I’m able to. Actually, I’m happy to keep writing as long as people keep buying my books.
I was always writing, since I was, like, 12.
To me, movies and music go hand in hand. When I’m writing a script, one of the first things I do is find the music I’m going to play for the opening sequence.
I occasionally play works by contemporary composers and for two reasons. First to discourage the composer from writing any more and secondly to remind myself how much I appreciate Beethoven.
When Basquiat was hanging out with Madonna and Fab Five Freddy, and all those worlds were colliding, people have to realize hip-hop and the arts were like this ’cause we both were outcasts: we wasn’t allowed inside the galleries or inside Yankee Stadium. We were writing in the street and making music.
There should be a law that no ordinary newspaper should be allowed to write about art. The harm they do by their foolish and random writing it would be impossible to overestimate – not to the artist, but to the public, blinding them to all but harming the artist not at all.
When I was 13, before I got in high school, I was writing mad raps. I didn’t really know if it was good or not, so for a year, I just held them. When I got in high school, I started spittin’ bars.
Characters are incredibly important, but I tend to build them around the plot during the outline stage. However, once I’m writing the manuscript, the characters I’m writing dictate how the plot unfolds.
I love writing but hate starting. The page is awfully white, and it says, ‘You may have fooled some of the people some of the time, but those days are over, giftless. I’m not your agent, and I’m not your mommy; I’m a white piece of paper. You wanna dance with me?’ and I really, really don’t. I’ll go peaceable-like.
If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.
The problem with writing about religion is that you run the risk of offending sincerely religious people, and then they come after you with machetes.
Keeping your head down and just writing is only part of the equation, so I surround myself with smart people to help sell my books.
The big problem with songwriting for me is starting a new song. It’s the thing where all the anguish exists, not in the writing of the song, but the starting of the new song. What do I write about? I never know.
If one of my romantic-comedy colleagues had written and directed ‘Love Actually,’ they would have been torn limb from limb. I thought it was awful, contrived, dreadful. I could see every twist and turn. I thought it was despicable. It was the writing that got me.
The most difficult and complicated part of the writing process is the beginning.
While writing ‘City Boy,’ I relied mainly on my own memories. In particular, I was able to describe the effect of gay liberation on an individual life (mine) as events paralleled my own growing self-acceptance; in this case, the political truly was the personal.
My music is constantly changing because I am. I’m writing it and changing as I’m writing.
I can see a version of my life where it all becomes meaningless. On a good day, writing seems noble. Other times, it’s narcissistic and pointless.
I’m writing an unauthorized autobiography.
If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that’s read by persons who move their lips when they’re reading to themselves.
In my off-time, I do record. Once in a while, I’ll just go into the studio if there’s a really good song that I have in my head and want to do. I think, as artists, you’re constantly in creative motion. If I stopped writing songs, then that’s a part of me that would stop in my life, and I need constant motion.
I learned that there is an inner strength that blossoms when one cleanses themselves by processing and attempting to comprehend their situation and/or experience. Writing became my therapy!
The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.
Writing by myself in my bedroom is definitely where I feel most creative.
A computer does not substitute for judgment any more than a pencil substitutes for literacy. But writing without a pencil is no particular advantage.
I love writing songs. I love doing my radio show and talking to the fans and listening to what they have to say, but there’s a certain responsibility that comes along with being given the gift of music. I take that seriously, but at the same time I try to use it to do something that makes a difference in a positive way.
I had a high school English teacher who made me really work at writing. And once, when I got an assignment back, she’d written: ‘This is so good, Andrew. This should be published!’ That made a big impression on me.
Some of my writing is very subconscious, and that’s definitely what happened with ‘Body Language‘ – I looped some basic bossa nova sounds and just started singing.
When you’re writing, you’re conjuring. It’s a ritual, and you need to be brave and respectful and sometimes get out of the way of whatever it is that you’re inviting into the room.
Activism is very seductive, and writing is painful and hard. It’s very scary to have a death threat living over your head. Activism is very sustaining. But I don’t view myself as a political person. I’m just someone who desperately wants to stay alive.
Through my writing, I have made new friends and continued to learn about this world of ours in all its wonder, with all its challenges.
Good writing is often about trying to investigate something you feel is missing and trying to put it back.
Learn as much by writing as by reading.
When I wrote ‘The West Wing,’ the juice behind it was that in popular culture, our leaders in government are generally portrayed as Machiavellian, or as idiots. I thought, well, how about writing about a group of hyper-competent people?
In all love stories the theme is love and tragedy, so by writing these types of stories, I have to include tragedy.
I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best.
I am a better person when I am writing, and I am probably a better mother because I can focus all that laser attention on these characters rather than worrying about my kids.
My singing is my hobby. It’s me and my brother. We just enjoy writing music.
The single best piece of advice I give to aspiring writers is to always write about things that they know. I suggest that they write about people and places and events and conflicts they are familiar with. That way their writing will be real and hopefully readers will respond to it. I try to take my own advice.
I ain’t no author, man… my writing skills are not of ‘New York Times‘ best-seller quality, trust and believe it ain’t. My vocabulary ain’t.
In the future, I’d like to continue being honest with myself and admit when I’d be better off asking someone else to illustrate my writing.
I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.
Your life isn’t about doing one perfect ‘thing’ and then falling down dead. It’s more like going to church or writing a book. You do it over and over, always trying to be a little bit better. Then you die.
Architectural kitsch is most common in the commercial pop vernacular – typified by the Big Duck of 1931 in Flanders, New York, a Long Island roadside poultry stand resembling a duck, which Venturi and Scott Brown made a cult object through their writings.
I was 22 and stopped writing plays, and I didn’t start again until I was 25. I was writing badly. In college, I attempted to write these more conventional plays, but the theater I loved was downtown experimental theater. I didn’t feel like I could do that either. It didn’t occur to me to do my own thing.
All autobiography is storytelling; all writing is autobiography.
When I was writing ‘You Suck,’ in 2006, I constructed the diction of the book’s narrator, perky Goth girl Abby Normal, from what I read on Goth blog sites.
There is a fluency and an ease with which true mastery and expertise always expresses itself, whether it be in writing, whether it be in a mathematical proof, whether it be in a dance that you see on stage, really in every domain. But I think the question is, you know, where does that fluency and mastery come from?
With writing fiction, I’m either not courageous enough or just not suited for telling truths in a more conventional way. As an actor, I inhabit those characters as I’m writing them.
As a musician I tell you that if you were to suppress adultery, fanaticism, crime, evil, the supernatural, there would no longer be the means for writing one note.
I’m not writing a Ph.D. Dissertation.
I was probably 7 years old when I started playing the guitar and writing some serious songs.
I established my first writing routine when I was 13. The school year had just ended, and I’d won a stack of books for being the best student in a number of subjects. The pile included several 60-leaved notebooks that I decided to fill with short stories.
When I went to school, I was already reading and writing. In fact, I was offended that the other kids couldn’t.
The most important thing is to read as much as you can, like I did. It will give you an understanding of what makes good writing and it will enlarge your vocabulary.
I do want to work on writing, because writing’s a skill. Writing is something that you can train yourself to know better. To know yourself better. And it’s intimidating as hell.
One of the hardest things about writing lyrics is to make the lyrics sit on the music in such a way that you’re not aware there was a writer there.
I am writing things on my own, but I really believe co-writing makes you a better writer.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that writing is mysterious; you don’t ever truly know where it is coming from, so don’t edit yourself line by line. Don’t get in your own way. Whatever is truly there at the core, that is your voice.
In writing a novel about George Sand, I hoped to present her as the talented, beguiling, complicated and occasionally infuriating woman I think she was, but I hope, too, that readers will enjoy the people she surrounded herself with.
Life is a lot more interesting if you are interested in the people and the places around you. So, illuminate your little patch of ground, the people that you know, the things that you want to commemorate. Light them up with your art, with your music, with your writing, with whatever it is that you do.
You don’t want to become guilty of plagiarism by letting someone else’s words get inadvertently mixed in with your own. If you do feel the need to paste in a block of research while you’re writing, be sure to highlight the copied text in a different color so you can go back and remove or rewrite it entirely later.
I got into writing because books and stories were always a big part of my life. I loved listening to them and then reading them, and I loved making them up.
I don’t think a lot of bands and artists work as hard as we do on the creation, on the writing, the arrangements and the recording in our format.
The single greatest line I ever wrote as an analyst was after Lomas said they were hedged: ‘The Lomas Financial Corporation is a perfectly hedged financial institution: it loses money in every conceivable interest rate environment.’ I enjoyed writing that sentence more than any sentence I ever wrote.
I’m writing a book. I’ve got the page numbers done.
Writers sometimes give up what is most strange and wonderful about their writing – soften their roughest edges – to accommodate themselves toward a group response.
Ultimately if you’re a journalist, one day you’re writing about figure skating, one day a political debate. I loved that about reporting. I like throwing my energies into various corners of the world.
I felt that I had to write. Even if I had never been published, I knew that I would go on writing, enjoying it and experiencing the challenge.
I have been writing poetry for a long time now. I started writing in my school days.
For myself, I keep writing. I’ve got to do something. I can’t sit on my hands and do nothing.
The heart and soul of good writing is research; you should write not what you know but what you can find out about.
Kids think you just sit down and start writing. I always tell them you never do that.
All art is propaganda, and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.
The core of my writing is not art but truth.
I used to type, but now, typing or working with a computer, I get a stiff neck. So I prefer writing longhand.
Real life is hard. I’m sorry, but shopping at Tesco is not as much fun as writing jokes for TV shows, and I struggle with it.
I remember reading the book ‘Rich Dad, Poor Dad,’ and I remember writing my goals down, and my number one goal in life was just to be a good husband and a good father someday. That was number one, as a 17-year-old kid.
For writing, I get up early in the morning – 5 o’clock, 4:30. I’m a morning person… So I try to do it while people are asleep. The mornings are the nicest.
Transforming a brand into a socially responsible leader doesn’t happen overnight by simply writing new marketing and advertising strategies. It takes effort to identify a vision that your customers will find credible and aligned with their values.
Like anything else that happens on its own, the act of writing is beyond currency. Money is great stuff to have, but when it comes to the act of creation, the best thing is not to think of money too much. It constipates the whole process.
Dissolving differences has always been an important motive for my writing, right from ‘The Mistress of Spices.’
I love writing – it’s the best. But I really hate collaboration.
What I do know is that writing is the thing I am best at, and I don’t have the stomach, the ability, the strength or the courage to enter the political arena. And I think writing can be a political act, if only to let those people accountable know they are being watched. Literature can be a conscience.
I think less than people think I do about politics. I care about writing.
I’m crushed by the responsibility of writing a satirical book.
When you’re writing first person, all I can see and tell as the author is what that main character can see.
Writing, for me, is the great organiser. It’s while writing that I think most deeply about things.
Every time I think I know what’s right and wrong, I end up being wrong. All I want to do is explore. I want to see what people would do. I say, ‘What would this person do in this situation?’ and I write it down. I’m not writing manifestos of my political views.
My writing was very much like my diary, and I just put it out there to put it out there because I didn’t really know what I was doing. The fact that people related to the songs made me feel less alone in a lot of situations.
I’m supposed to be taking time off. But I’m still writing and I have this Gap advert lined up.
Writing is like a ‘lust,’ or like ‘scratching when you itch.’ Writing comes as a result of a very strong impulse, and when it does come, I, for one, must get it out.
Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature’s chief masterpiece is writing well.
I love Roger Deakin’s writing, and enjoyed making a programme about wild swimming for BBC4, inspired by his book about his own aquatic adventures, ‘Waterlog’.
I will direct one day. I need some more life experience before I feel like I can do something like that comfortably. It’d be a feature, it’d be something maybe that I had in writing as well.
I’ve been writing a lot of sad songs, and I got to the point where I was like, ‘You can’t write another one or you’re lying.’
I’ve never thought of myself as a writer. I still don’t, despite all the writing I’ve done.
I’ve always had this interest in sibling relationships because I don’t have any siblings. I’m completely a product of the one-child policy in China, so I always kind of wished that I had an older brother or a younger brother or sister just to have that bond, so I find myself constantly writing about that relationship.
I’ve always wanted to be in journalism. I even started a course at Loughborough doing media studies. I like all sports, and I am keen on writing. But I thought that while I was still young, I ought to make a real go of it at badminton. So I have put all my focus on playing sport instead of writing about it.
I went to USC and got my first break writing for a kids’ show called ‘Pepper Ann.’
When I am writing, I do not distinguish between the natural and supernatural. Everything seems real. That is my world, you could say.
Writing is a calling, not a choice.
I was in the middle of filming Season 3 of ‘Grace and Frankie.’ Then the writing process for ‘Mystery Science Theater 3000’ was happening at the exact same time. And then the pre-production for ‘Fatherless’ was happening at the exact same time as well.
I’m always happy, in every game, every win I keep writing my history, and I hope to do even more from now on.
I suppose more than anything, it’s the way of life in this part of the country that influences my writing. In Eastern North Carolina, with the exception of Wilmington, most people live in small towns.
I believe that writing is derivative. I think good writing comes from good reading.
Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.
I’ll have to get people to write songs for me right now until my own writing comes around.
I first wrote for adults, but when I started writing for young people, it was the most creative and liberating experience of my life. I was able to express my own deepest feelings far more than I ever could when writing for adults.
Respect the language in which you write. Be kind, develop good vocabulary, and be creative in writing beautiful sentences. Your prose should be your poetry when you write.
The discipline of writing something down is the first step toward making it happen.
Erudition – that is, reading, writing, and arithmetic – is taught in the schools; but where is the more important quality, character, taught? Nowhere in particular. There is no authorized training for children in character.
When I am writing anything in general, I just want to tell the story that exists in my head; I don’t try to write a parable or make a point.
Certainly, I am writing as a 21st-century woman, so I am much more inclined to view her as a three-dimensional woman. I think we keep coming up with this stubborn problem of a woman being judged by her appearance rather than her accomplishments. We are much more inclined to ask: was Cleopatra beautiful?
I never produce a song, whether writing it or making a beat, and give it a wack visual or wack performance. I’m like a trifecta.
Normally I work out a general summary of what I mean to do, then start writing, and the details can be different from my anticipation. So there is considerable flow, but always within channels.
I started writing poetry when I was 12 years old and also undertook vocal training since a young age. However, it was only during my time at the University of Oxford did the musician in me came alive.
This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.
But me writing sad songs doesn’t mean I am a sad person.
Writing music is not so much inspiration as hard work.
When I wrote ‘Lean In,’ some people argue that I did not spend enough time writing about the difficulties women face when they don’t have a partner. They were right.
I’m relentless when it comes to writing and recording.
I have concluded that Literature is no proper pursuit for a gentleman and that Writing ought never to be consider’d but as an elegant Accomplishment to be indulg’d in with infrequency and Discrimination.
I’m not a born writer, and I don’t enjoy writing.
We speak about understanding each other, having those conversations nationwide – culturally, historically – and yet there’s a lot of gaps. So I want to assist with closing the gap of knowing about and hearing about our Latino communities in terms of literature, in terms of writing.
I have always been fascinated by the way things work and how they came to take the form that they did. Writing about these things satisfies my curiosity about the made world while at the same time giving me an opportunity to design a new explanation for the processes that shape it.
My greatest strength as a child, I realize now, was my imagination. While every other kid was reading and writing, I had seven whole hours a day to practice my imagination. When do you get that space in your life, ever?
Artists don’t talk about art. Artists talk about work. If I have anything to say to young writers, it’s stop thinking of writing as art. Think of it as work.
If you can’t turn yourself into your customer, you probably shouldn’t be in the ad writing business at all.
Good writing is like a windowpane.
U2 is sort of song writing by accident really. We don’t really know what we’re doing and when we do, it doesn’t seem to help.
Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.
Writing doesn’t come easily to me. It gets more and more difficult.
The problem is when you are writing something in retrospective, it needs a lot of courage not to change, or you will forget a certain reality, and you will just take in consideration your view today.
I’ve always felt writing is an art. Publishing is a business. I felt strongly if I was going to write, I would write what I wanted to, and if the ‘market’ didn’t respond, there was nothing I could really do about it.
Searching for music is like searching for God. They’re very similar. There’s an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unseeable, the unspeakable, all those things, comes into being a composer and to writing music and to searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don’t exist.
I loved ‘Everybody Loves Raymond‘ because I like Ray and I thought it was beautifully cast, I thought it was great writing. I thought Patricia Heaton was wonderful.
Writing is like jazz. It can be learned, but it can’t be taught.
A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery.
Advertising isn’t just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought. At every company that sells ads, a significant portion of their engineering team spends their day tuning data mining, writing better code to collect all your personal data.
I never know, when I start writing a story, what’s going to happen, or how it will all get sorted out.
There is a prevailing school of thought that something good must take time, sometimes years to create and hone. I have always felt that the books I have written fastest have been my best – because I caught an unstoppable momentum in the writing.
I figure I wrote 37 songs in 20 years, and that’s not exactly a full-time job. It wasn’t that I was writing and writing and writing and quit. Every now and then I wrote something, and every now and then I didn’t. The second just outnumbered the first.
For years, I meant to read ‘Arabian Sands‘, Wilfred Thesiger’s account of two punishing camel journeys during the late 1940s across Southern Arabia’s Empty Quarter. Now that I have, I can sheepishly join the chorus of those who revere the book as one of the half dozen greatest works of modern English travel writing.
Sometimes I wonder if I’m a character being written, or if I’m writing myself.
In terms of writing characters or stories, at least initially, there’s no difference between live-action and animation. A good story is a good story, whatever the medium.
I feel like for me the lyric writing really comes from just what’s going on in my heart and that’s what consumes me; think a lot of our heart is relationships. Not just with boyfriend or girlfriend but all your relationships in your life with other people and our interactions with other humans.
It’s like a novelist writing far out things. If it makes a point and makes sense, then people like to read that. But if it’s off in left field and goes over the edge, you lose it. The same with musical talent, I think.
Never think you can’t do something. I definitely never thought I could write a book, and even after I started writing it, I was like, ‘Oh my God, how am I gonna write a book?’ Just set your sights high and reach for the stars. Go live your dreams, and never think you can’t.
I have a lot of teenage readers and readers in their early twenties. My writing style appeals to them. And if they look at my picture on the back of the book, they don’t see someone who looks like their mother.
I was making the music and writing the songs which reflected the emerging consciousness of my generation.
A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
When you’re writing a screenplay, it’s like you’re dreaming the film for yourself again and again and again until it becomes almost like a memory before you make it.
If you are a serious writer or just a normal one, in one way or another, you are writing in the service of freedom. All writers know, understand, or dream that their work will be in the service of freedom.
The thing that makes writing so difficult is you don’t have the element of serendipity. At least with a photograph, you can set up the camera, and something might happen. You might be a lousy photographer, but you can get a good picture if you just take enough of them.
My idea of what’s good and bad and right and wrong is maybe greyer than most, and I like writing about that.
Esoteric or inner knowledge is no different from other kinds of human knowledge and ability. It is a mystery for the average person only to the extent that writing is a mystery for those who have not yet learned to write.
I don’t read blogs. I’m living the life they’re writing about. So why read about it?
I wouldn’t say I’m underrated, but more reserved. Only time will tell, but I’ve been good so far in being consistent and making hit after hit writing for myself and other artists, from rap to R&B, and being able to make those different records.
Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.
Action is greater than writing. A good man is a nobler object of contemplation than a great author. There are but two things worth living for: to do what is worthy of being written; and to write what is worthy of being read.
I’m not writing to encourage people to read my book or even books in general. That’s not my job. My job is to write them. And if people want to read them, that’s great.
All I can guess is that when I write, I forget that it’s not real. I’m living the story, and I think people can read that sincerity about the characters. They are real to me while I’m writing them, and I think that makes them real to the readers as well.
I started writing a journal, and I was learning so much along the way. How to deal with your family, how to deal with your friends.
When you’re writing, it’s all up to you, and you don’t have to make any compromises. And when you’re directing, there’s this intense pleasure you get from working with all these really talented people, and pooling the efforts towards a common goal. I like all the aspects of film-making.
Everyone who has ever met me for at least five minutes knows I’m a really funny person. I love to laugh and to make people laugh, so writing comedy comes naturally to me.
People ask me if there are going to be stories of Harry Potter as an adult. Frankly, if I wanted to, I could keep writing stories until Harry is a senior citizen, but I don’t know how many people would actually want to read about a 65 year old Harry still at Hogwarts playing bingo with Ron and Hermione.
Follow your instincts. Do the kind of writing you love to do and do best. ‘Stiff’ was an oddball book – I mean, a funny book about cadavers? – and I worried that it would be too unconventional. In the end, that’s what has made it a success, I think.
With the release of her fourth album, ‘Red,’ in 2012 and a handful of highly publicized romances, Taylor was criticized by the press and other entertainers for such sinful acts as dating people and writing songs about it, gaining a reputation as boy-crazy and love-ridden.
I write because I have an innate need to. I write because I can’t do normal work. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can partake of real life only by changing it.
If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don’t listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.
I wanted to do Playboy to get across the same ideas I’m singing and writing about these days. It’s all about proving that a woman can defy stereotypes.
As a kid, I was just writing scripts and taking whatever film classes I could in college.
I grew up in the theatre. It’s where I got my start. Writing a television drama with theatrical dialogue about the theatre is beyond perfection.
It’s easy to get discouraged; just keep writing because you love to do it, and you’ll keep improving.
Books and all forms of writing are terror to those who wish to suppress the truth.
You know, the process of making a documentary is one of discovery, and like writing a story, you follow a lead and that leads you to something else and then by the time you finish, the story is nothing like you expected.
Dreams are illustrations from the book your soul is writing about you.
At one point, I wanted to be a wildlife photographer. I also love to travel, so maybe I’d do travel writing.
It’s important, I think, for a writer of fiction to maintain an awareness of the pace and shape of the book as he’s writing it. That is, he should be making an object, not chattering.
I work day-to-day on C# and .Net and work at home two days a week so I can do deep thinking, writing and reflecting.
I think for me I was in kindergarten, so I was very young and my teacher acknowledged that I was very dyslexic when it came to reading and writing and processing that information.
Writing the first draft of a new story is incredibly difficult for me. I will happily do revisions, because once I can see the words on the page, I can go about ripping them up and moving scenes around. A blank page, though? Terrifying. I’m always angsty when I’m working my way through a first draft.
Writing a screenplay is so spare, it kind of reminded me that I really should celebrate what I can do in a book, which is description: for example, places, people, locations.
I don’t know much about creative writing programs. But they’re not telling the truth if they don’t teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.
You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.
I could have been a cult writer if I’d kept writing surrealistic novels. But I wanted to break into the mainstream, so I had to prove that I could write a realistic book.
You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That’s why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.
There’s something to be said for writing in the morning. At other points in the day, you’re a bit more defensive.
Somebody once asked me what my theory of life was, and I said, ‘Don’t try.’ That fits the writing, too. I don’t try; I just type.
If I’m grumpy I sure do enjoy writing The Walking Dead.
There is sometimes a feeling in crime fiction that good writing gets in the way of story. I have never felt that way. All you have is language. Why write beneath yourself? It’s an act of respect for the reader as much as yourself.
‘An Octoroon’ was written over about three years but premiered in 2014. I’m writing about America’s relationship to its own history. Race or not, it’s a story about suppression and oppression and many populations being devalued systematically.
I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time.
Every writer I know has trouble writing.
Once I’ve written something it does tend to run away from me. I don’t seem to have any part of it – it’s no longer my piece of writing.
Choreography is writing on your feet.
I believe that reading widely is the best preparation for writing.
Poetry is its own medium; it’s very different than writing prose. Poetry can talk in an imagistic sense, it has particular ways of catching an environment.
Everything I’ve ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it.
Heartbreak can definitely give you a deeper sensibility for writing songs. I drew on a lot of heartbreak when I was writing my first album, I didn’t mean to but I just did.
When I’m writing film music, I feel like I’m more a filmmaker than a composer. It’s more about what the film needs. I’m basically part of the team that’s creating a film, and the music is a very important part, but it’s just one part of many.
When you’re making music, it’s meant to be shared with people. Sometimes, even if I’m writing a song, someone else brings a vibe. There’s something different about it. If someone can play a better bassline than me, I’ll let them do it. I’m just here to fit in and see where it goes.
I’ve always believed in writing without a collaborator, because where two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worry and only half the royalties.
The writer’s duty is to keep on writing.
I’m always getting texts asking why I’m not responding on Instagram or Facebook, and I’m like, ‘It’s not me. You’re writing to some stranger.’
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: writing picture books is an art – the art of word choice.
Painting and writing are solitary arts.
I have recommended in my writings the study of civic virtues, without which there is no redemption. I have written likewise (and repeat my words) that reforms, to be beneficial, must come from above, that those which come from below are irregularly gained and uncertain.
I started with CB radio, ham radio, and eventually went into computers. And I was just fascinated with it. And back then, when I was in school, computer hacking was encouraged. It was an encouraged activity. In fact, I remember one of the projects my teacher gave me was writing a log-in simulator.
There are so many opportunities in life, that the loss of two or three capabilities is not necessarily debilitating. A handicap can give you the opportunity to focus more on art, writing, or music.
I’m just writing songs about how I feel or about how people I know feel.
The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it, and copy it.
I love writing two narratives! I think concurrent storylines are my favorite way to write a book.
Writing can’t change the world overnight, but writing may have an enormous effect over time, over the long haul.
I like to oversee what I do, so I have a hand in writing my songs. I also have people there to help me with my vision.
I stay out of politics because if I begin thinking too much about politics, I’ll probably… drop writing children’s books and become a political cartoonist again.
Right when I moved to L.A., I started writing. I wrote some screenplay. I’m sure it’s terrible. But I wrote a screenplay by myself. When I first moved to L.A., I had no friends. I didn’t know anybody. I just sat in a little studio apartment, and I wrote a screenplay.
I worked with some directors, and it was really collaborative, and I was sort of writing with them. I was giving so many pieces of myself to their movies, I thought, ‘It’s about time I use my own voice for me, and establish my own voice.’ So I knew I wanted to make films.
My mom was always writing me notes to get me out of stuff.
Everything I do, writing, touring, travelling, it all comes from the punk and hardcore attitude, from that expression – from being open to try things but relying on yourself, taking what you have into the battle and making of it what you will, hoping you can figure it out as you go. Make some sense of it.
Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it’s about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.
Writing is my love. If you love something, you find a lot of time. I write for two hours a day, usually starting at midnight; at times, I start at 11.
I was inspired by lots of people, certainly in acting and in writing and stuff, but I never wanted to be somebody else.
It’s hard to decide how to match words to music. It’s not like it’s twice the work. It’s always difficult for me to explain to the composer what I’m looking for. I’m not a professional; I lack even basic knowledge about writing music.
Whether you’re keeping a journal or writing as a meditation, it’s the same thing. What’s important is you’re having a relationship with your mind.
All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.
I have no interest in writing confessions, in deliberately baring myself to my readers. I prefer to remain behind a screen.
But just as they did in Philadelphia when they were writing the constitution, sooner or later, you’ve got to compromise. You’ve got to start making the compromises that arrive at a consensus and move the country forward.
I am conscious of trying to stretch the boundaries of non-fiction writing. It’s always surprised me how little attention many non-fiction writers pay to the formal aspects of their work.
Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it.
If you really want to know yourself, start by writing a book.
Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.
One of the maddening ironies of writing books is that it leaves so little time for reading others’. My bedside is piled with books, but it’s duty reading: books for book research, books for review. The ones I pine for are off on a shelf downstairs.
I can’t remember why or how I started writing, but I think it was always a way of making sense of the world.
Writing, of course, is writing, acting comes from the theater, and cinematography comes from photography. Editing is unique to film. You can see something from different points of view almost simultaneously, and it creates a new experience.
Writing is a journey of discovery because until you start, you never know what will happen, and you can be surprised by what you do – expect the unexpected!
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
I worry that I am not really a person anymore: I’m more of just a writing machine. I wonder what that has done to either my life and or my art.
With comedy, I think it’s so important, especially in TV, to know and trust what the writers are writing and just have it down.
The demand in India is to have a hit, which becomes a promotion for the movie and makes people come to the theater. You have five songs and different promotions based on those. But when I do Western films, the need for originality is greater. Then I become very conscious about the writing.
I’ve been writing all these books that have been largely autobiographical and yet, really, they don’t tell you anything about me. I just use my life story as a kind of device on which to hang comic observations. It’s not my interest or instinct to tell the world anything pertinent about myself or my family.
Writing is a very strenuous thing – it’s like banging your head against a wall. At the end of the day, acting is better, just because nobody ever asked me if I wanted a Pellegrino in the writer’s room.
I do not pretend to write much of a letter. You know under what circumstances I am writing.
Charity is just writing checks and not being engaged. Philanthropy, to me, is being engaged, not only with your resources but getting people and yourself really involved and doing things that haven’t been done before.
Although I enjoyed writing Film Music it was always a means to an end, in that it enabled me to keep a wife and family and write my classical music, which has always been my passion.
‘The L-Word’ was such a great show because of the amazing writing and characters, but maybe because it was such a new concept, people couldn’t pick up on it, but I think it was down to the dynamic characters and how well done it was.
Writing is what I do. It’s like breathing to me at a certain point, but if I couldn’t write, I do like cooking.
While ‘Twilight”s popularity was undeniable among both the teenagers they were aimed at and middle-aged women who flocked to the series in droves, Meyer has drawn her share of criticism for her writing. Some feminist critics assailed what they saw as Bella’s mooning over her vampire lover.
I didn’t disappear; I started writing songs and worked behind the scenes.
I don’t really have a writing process. I don’t write at all but, honestly, I feel like it’s a modern-day writing because everything is technology and if I go in there and freestyle and I keep it, I feel like I wrote that. If I go in there and fix it, it’s almost like something I wrote.
It gives me confidence to know that what I’m writing has a veracity of its own without me having to invent it. When I’m writing fiction, I must believe it to be true, or I can see no point in it.
You know how you have that one thing you would do even if you’re not getting paid to do it? That’s what writing music is for me.
The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful, to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.
Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.
Freedom is the basic prerequisite for writing.
