Writing Quotes
Most Famous Writing Quotes of All Time!
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And dialogue, I'm good at it, and it's because it's the only thing you have to work with in TV writing.
In a lot of ways, TV writing taught me how to be a good storyteller. I learned about dialogue, scenes, moving the plot forward.
I think that's the most important job of a novelist - to bring authority to their writing.
In TV writing, I felt like Gulliver being tied down by the Lilliputians. There's so much more freedom in fiction writing.
I learned that comedy is born out of strong characters. I won't begin writing a character until I have a clear take on them.
I naively thought I would quit television writing, move up to Seattle, my novel would come out, and then I'd have a novel writing career, and so I found myself really stuck in this very poisonous self-pitying state and felt like I'd never write again. And I blamed Seattle for that.
Even when I was writing 'Where'd You Go, Bernadette,' I started to appreciate Seattle's many charms.
A good writer cannot avoid having social consciousness. I don't mean this about small pieces of writing, but about a big book. If it's a big book, there has to be more than one undertow.
I loved 'Dexter.' I loved the writing of 'Dexter.' I thought that was a brilliant show, and Michael C. Hall was just brilliant.
When you're writing about superpowers, you're writing about power. When you're writing about immortals, you're writing about mortality.
The Italian futurists, the German expressionists, and the British vorticists were fascinated by speed and the ways the modern world was shattering conventions. The old ways of painting, writing, sculpting, and composing no longer seemed adequate to capture the world.
When you are writing, of course, you have to do all that writing and correcting for yourself. When I was a librarian it was expected that I would know about a wide range of books.
The use of criticism, in periodical writing, is to sift, not to stamp a work.
Sometimes I can spend as long revising a manuscript as I spent writing it in the first place.
When writing isn't going well-then the bad thing about being a writer is that I also have the freedom and flexibility to do something badly, and no one else can fix it for me.
Eventually the bad stuff I'm writing turns into better stuff. Other times, I've just walked away from what I was working on, and figured I'd have a better perspective when I came back to it.
A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.
When I write, I try not to cast in my head, because then I'm writing to a major movie star, and it picks up those ticks, and that's not what I want to do.
A decade in advertising exposed me to plenty of schemers and backstabbers. But honestly, advertising is wonderful training for fiction. Writing novels is much easier if you've ever tried to write a billboard.
And much as I enjoy writing and creating stuff, I don't enjoy it so much that I am willing to give up any time that could otherwise be spent performing.
A reading man and woman is a ready man and woman, but a writing man and woman is exact.
Through the misguided notion that writing about flying was easy, I had McCone become a pilot. When I learned that research in books wasn't enough, I forced myself to take lessons.
When you're writing fiction, you're in every character 'cause you can't help it.
Many actors in films are willing to go to Broadway, and screenwriters are writing plays. It's almost commonplace.
I'm excited and terrified to write something new. I won't be writing about suburbia.
On 'Stranger Than Fiction,' the script was so good that I stuck to every line because it was just such brilliant writing from Zach Helm that I felt like I really just want to shoot the page.
It's always really hard to kill off someone who you just really enjoy working with, writing for, and seeing on the screen.
My only fantasy about writing was that in my old days, after directing many masterpieces, I would write my memoirs.
I often attribute my screenwriting to journalism because they drill in the who, what, when, where and why - but we really need to land on that why. That's what I've been exploring in my writing for many years and trying to get better at.
If I weren't a performer, I would be still be writing and songwriting. Plus, I also really want to get into producing.
My boys asked me to write beautiful letters for their ex-girls so they could get them back. I thought, 'I should be writing songs for myself.'
I can ask for a £25,000 advance, but then you spend a year writing the book, and £25,000 is a loan against sales, and you can easily spend five years earning out. So that's £25,000 for six years.
I find myself, by happy accident, writing 'Young Adult' fiction. However, I dislike such categories.
We do not need to proselytise either by our speech or by our writing. We can only do so really with our lives. Let our lives be open books for all to study.
I just didn't really know who I was, so I didn't really know what I sounded like. And so I did a lot of writing, and I studied abroad, and I fell in love, and, like... I got to be like any other college student.
The hardest thing about writing a script is you finish it, but it doesn't mean anything. It's not like a novel or short story - a script is meant to be made into a movie.
When I first read the scenes I got to audition, I just could tell there was obviously something there. The writing speaks for itself, but also it's just the fact that 'The Handmaid's Tale' is such an amazing story. I had never read the book before I auditioned.
You need to get outside of your comfort zone to write songs that are interesting, songs that are compelling, songs that are different from what other people are writing.
If I wasn't an actor, I would probably be writing or doing something with psychology.
It is vitally important for me, both personally and for my writing, to be able to return to China freely, so being barred entry has caused me deep concern and distress.
After the Tiananmen Massacre, I felt compelled not only to continue writing but to actively resist the restrictions placed on freedom of speech. I set up the publishing company in Hong Kong, with offices in Shenzhen in mainland China, and managed to publish works of fiction, philosophy, and politics by unapproved authors.
I must have been five or six when I realised all the stuff I was writing made sense with what I was playing on the piano.
I've been in two long-term relationships and - this sounds awful - they were really helpful for writing heartbreak. It makes good songs.
When writers stop to sharpen pencils or get up and make coffee to procrastinate, they still stay in their heads with their characters. But when you zip over to read email or check your Facebook page, you get zapped out of the fictive dream. It's brutal on my writing.
Nora Roberts, Stephen King, Lee Child and George R. R. Martin write wildly different books. Their writing, plotting and styles have little or nothing in common. But they all write books and characters that readers find appealing.
Writing's like gambling. Unpredictable and sporadic successes make you more addicted, not less.
A good ground rule for writing in any genre is, start with a form, then undermine its confidence in itself. Ask what it's afraid of, what it's trying to hide - then write that.
Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over world-building.
My focus is films, and 'Angela's Eyes' is one of those TV projects that has some good TV concepts behind it and good writing.
Modern as the style of Pascal's writing is, his thought is deeply impregnated with the spirit of the Middle Ages. He belonged, almost equally, to the future and to the past.
I've been in the songwriting circuit as well. I've been in a couple writing camps where there are seven top writers or whatever, and they're writing songs for a young girl or a young guy that are coming up, and they're kind of nuts.
What I often do when I'm writing, if I can't find that story, I go out and I hunt for it.
I'm one of those writers who, when writing, believes she's god-and that she hasn't bestowed free will on any of her characters. In that sense there are no surprises in any of my books.
Short-story writing requires an exquisite sense of balance. Novelists, frankly, can get away with more. A novel can have a dull spot or two, because the reader has made a different commitment.
When I started writing 'Luck in the Shadows,' I just wanted to create an adventure story.
Realism isn't something most people associate with the fantasy genre, yet it's an essential element of great fantasy writing.
My best writing has to do with an internal process that I'm working out unconsciously and put into my characters.
I think the close work I do as a translator pays off in my writing - I'm always searching for multiple ways to say things.
I started writing the one-sentence stories when I was translating 'Swann's Way.' There were two reasons. I had almost no time to do my own writing, but didn't want to stop. And it was a reaction to Proust's very long sentences.
Collections aren't really planned. I just keep writing short pieces until I have enough for a collection.
If a translation doesn't have obvious writing problems, it may seem quite all right at first glance. We readers, after all, quickly adapt to the style of a translator, stop noticing it, and get caught up in the story.
I was a weird kid. It wasn't until I saw 'Aguirre: The Wrath of God' at 16 that my whole world changed. The obsession with that was equal to the obsession with writing.
Poetry is how I feed the soul, and it's how I fire the furnace of writing.
Writing went from being a calling to being a job. Business ruined things. It became like making sausages in a sausage factory.
A great Chicano forebear of mine in writing is Rolando Hinojosa-Smith. He was writing good border mysteries for Chicano readers back in the '80s and '90s.
Speaking and writing English perfectly should not be a privilege. To those who try to politicize this matter, I tell them now, do not mess with the future of our children.
I don't keep any copy of my books around... they would embarass me. When I finish writing my books, I kick them in the belly, and have done with them.
One of the first things I want do when I start writing music for a film is to create its own sound world, its own music world.
When I'm by myself - composing or writing film scores - it's very lonely. I'm just sitting by myself in the studio.
I've worked with Childish Gambino for so long, so I've learned that from those producing skills - how to really produce music - where, of course, it's about writing, but it's also about combining sounds and styles and genres.
I started writing songs, I guess, when I was about 13 or 14, but I didn't know if they were good enough yet or anything.
I wanted to play piano, and that slid quickly into writing - it wasn't enough to play other people's notes: I had to write notes too.
Once you are a proper, serious law-maker, you can't break the laws you're writing.
A good novel is a good novel, pointe finale. And I think what I'm writing is exactly that.
I guess what led to me writing 'Holes' was having moved to Texas in 1991, and it was sort of my reaction to Texas.
I don't think too much about the audience when I'm writing... I'm aware that 'Holes' was read by kids as young as 8, up to adults.
In writing 'A Portrait of Athens' I have attempted - rather impressionistically - to give a panorama of its present. But I have also brought in its past because I sincerely think that there is a continuity.
I have no interest in writing confessions, in deliberately baring myself to my readers. I prefer to remain behind a screen.
I think I am less self-assured when I write English than I would be if I were writing in my first language. I have to test each sentence over and over to be sure that it's right, that I haven't introduced some element that isn't English.
The more you're writing absolutely honestly, and absolutely bare of intention - even if it feels absolutely personal and small because it's at your own scale - other people relate to it much more.
It was a little at a time but I broke out my Walkman and my lyric pad and started writing.
I enjoy talking to groups who are interested in the writing process or the industry. I never teach - because truthfully, I don't know how it all works; it just does. Sort of magic-like. But I love to share my experiences and perspectives.
To be honest, I chose romance because writing a book seemed so dauntingly long. I looked around for something short, discovered Harlequin romances, and decided to read a few to see if I could do it.
It must have been when I was 14 or 15 that I started tentatively writing songs and was able to convey an emotion and a lyric with what I wanted to say.
It takes awhile for writers to get to know actors rhythms, not just as actors, but what they bring to the characters. I think it takes a few episodes for the writing room to catch up to the actors and vice versa.
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