Best 30386 quotes in «writing quotes» category

Pencil in your plans but write your visions in ink

People always go on about sleaze, but I think it's only a small part of what I write about.

People always say, "Can writing be taught?" I always think, I can teach you how to write a better sentence, how to do dialogue, how to do character, but I can't teach you how to be a decent person, and I can't teach you how to have something to say.

Pedro Teixeira, the great Portuguese merchant-adventurer, wrote a beautiful description of a coffeehouse with windows overlooking the Tigris and the ruins of old Baghdad. That was in 1604, and he's visiting the same street that I write about in the book, named after Abu Nuwas, though it wasn't called that back then.

People always say I write a lot of pop culture references. Can somebody please count the pop culture references in 'Firefly?' Because I don't know how to put this to you, but there was one. I referenced The Beatles in the pilot.

People always write on my Facebook that they've seen somebody they thought was me on the subway, and I was cursing badly.

People always ask me about the role models that I'm providing for kids, and I say I can't be concerned with that. I'm not worrying about corrupting youth. I'm worrying about writing realistically and truthfully to affect the reader.

People are always asking me what my lyrics mean. Does it mean this, does it mean that, that's all anybody wants to know. F**k them, darling. I say what any decent poet would say if you dared ask him to analyze his work: If you see it, dear, then it's there. ... I think my melodies are superior to my lyrics. ... I was never too keen on the British music press. They've called us a supermarket hype, and they used to suggest that we didn't write our own songs.

People are born with the knack to write poems and songs. I'm not a poet at all.

People are gonna think that MTV censored me, and they really didn't. I really wanted to try to make a show that didn't rely on offensive, edgy material because I think it was an exercise in trying to write without that. Because I see that as a crutch sometimes and I want to know that I can do something funny and worthwhile without that. And also make a show that my parents would like and that kids could watch with their parents.

People are going to write and say things you don't like. They're going to take things out of context. What are you going to do? You can't let it destroy your life. That's their problem. They're going to go on and not be respected for what they do. Just worry about what you do. You have to make up your mind. You also have to be prepared for fallout. You have to accept the industry you're in.

People are naive about such things, and they would rather write them off as evil than attempt to understand them. An unfortunate truth, but a truth nonetheless.

People are in denial all the time, hiding things. If I tell you a racist or dirty joke and you laugh, you're telling me something about yourself, which you don't want to reveal. Accessing that hidden side is what good acting is all about. And there are only a handful of people in the entire United States who interest me as actors, who surprise me. Even people who write about it, don't know anything about good performance. At least when you work at General Motors, you know something about cars.

People are reading more and writing more because of the internet. So the virtual world is a way for me to listen to my readers and interact with my readers. It is a way that they can voice their opinion.

People are rushed and inspired by the success of Indian writers, and are falling over themselves to write novels. Every Indian is writing a novel right now. No one wants to revise.

People are writing shorter jokes. The style I've started with was almost trying to keep jokes under 140 characters before Twitter.

People ask me when I decided to become a playwright, and I tell them I decide to do it every day. Most days it's very hard because I'm frightened - not frightened of writing a bad play, although that happens often with me. I'm frightened of encountering the wilderness of my own spirit, which is always , no matter how many plays I write, a new and uncharted place. Every day when I sit down to write, I can't remember how it's done.

People ask me whether I think that one day I might wake up one morning and run dry, but I've had the opposite feeling - that I would die before I had time to write all the ideas in my drawer.

People assume that science is a very cold sort of profession, whereas writing novels is a warm and fuzzy intuitive thing. But in fact, they are not at all different.

People ask me: "Do I consider myself to be a Latino writer?" "What does it mean to be Latino?" Those are very strange questions to answer , but feminism is easier because it's just an ideology, a way I live my life. And absolutely in the most political sense I try to sit down and write very strong female roles.

People ask, 'Why would you cast yourself in your movie?' And, for me, it's more like an achievement that I am now not playing all the parts, you know? Like I was for so long, in all my performances and a lot of my short movies. So, that's where I'm coming from, not out of a kind of actress-y sense of myself. I mean, I don't really see myself as an actress, but more from performance: this is how you make something. You do it yourself. You're in it and you write it. I think I keep doing it that way, 'cause it's my way. It's what makes me feel like I know how to do it.

People associate me with a time when movies were pleasant, when women wore pretty dresses in films and you heard beautiful music. I always love it when people write me and and say 'I was having a rotten time, and I walked into a cinema and saw one of your movies, and it made such a difference.'

People begin to write in order to create what they have not found and, a little bit, to give something back.

People can be cruel,' he says with a sympathetic look that makes me trust him even more. And right then I realize that he is not writing down all my words in a file, which I really appreciate, let me tell you.

People ask me what I'm writing. They think I'm Sandra Tsing Loh. Or they ask about stand-up. 'No, that's Margaret Cho.' I really think there is this kind of glomming, that they think we are somehow all the same person.

People ask me: "Why do you write about food, and eating, and drinking? Why don't you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way the others do?" . . . The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry.

People as me how I do research for my science fiction. The answer is, I never do any research.

People call me for the ballads. Apparently that's where I've been pigeonholed. But it's really interesting and really fun. It's my favourite part of the job, writing.

People can defame anyone they like, people can write anything they like. But non-accountability is a part of modern Indian culture.

People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach us how to talk to other people: it teaches us how to talk to ourselves. What I'm desperately trying to do is to get students to talk to themselves as though they are indeed themselves, and not someone else.

People didn't know certain things about me, which... I was out of creative writing class in school, Syracuse University; had a B.A. in English and wanted to write the great American novel but I also loved rock and roll. I was in bar bands all through college, playing fraternities and have to know all the songs in the top 10. That kind of thing.

People do amazing things for love. Books are full of wonderful stories about this kind of stuff, and stories aren’t just fantasies, you know. They’re so much a part of the people who write them that they practically teach their readers invaluable lessons about life.

People can take your name and write a book about you and they make money off of it. How is the public supposed to know you're not authorizing that book? As soon as you make a big stink about it it only makes the book sell more.

People care enough to write blogs and reviews and things, which is nice.

People complain of the unequal distribution of wealth [but it is a far greater] injustice that any one man should have the power to write so many brilliant essays... There is no one who writes like [Thomas Huxley].

People can write jokes five minutes after a major world event happens, and have hundreds of thousands of people read them within 10 minutes. Whereas before you write a joke, you don't know if anybody is really touching on it or not, and you tell it onstage the next night. For joke writing it has changed things.

People don't actually, a lot of times, know the game behind the game. If people think that they do, it's a little bit of a naïve assessment of how the [writing] industry works.

People don't ever seem to realize that doing what's right, writes no guarantee against misfortune.

People don't think of writers as sex objects. The women who write to me and suggest that we ought to have sex usually turn out to be, like, eighty. And their letters always end with, "Just joking.

People don't really have a relationship with great writing or great production or great art direction or great direction. They just sort of admire it.

People don't tend to notice, but in the past 10 years especially there's been a lot of growth in how I write songs and what goes into them. You can listen to Mountain Goats from 1991 to 2007 and never hear a seventh chord. In 2007 or 2008, I started working on the piano to grow as a songwriter. I started throwing major sevens in and sixes and more interesting stuff.

People don't write about kids; you have to give them a lot of freedom, and that causes anarchy and that causes farce.

People do tell a writer things that they don't tell others. I don't know why, unless it is that having read one or two of his books they feel on peculiarly intimate terms with him; or it may be that they dramatize themselves and, seeing themselves as it were as characters in a novel, are ready to be as open with him as they imagine the characters of his invention are.

People don't understand that we're not warriors in their cause. We're a group of people that really feel that they want to write jokes about the absurdity that we see in government and the world and all that, and that's it.

People do support themselves as artists and writers, so there's no need to be all doom and gloom about it. You just have to push forward. You have to follow your vision and hope for the best. You have to write for love.

People even split up by text message, they dump each other by text. Everything seems so disposable, so throwaway, but you have to engage with that if you're writing about the modern world. You've also got all these pop references that you feel obligated to make. They're just part of the bricolage of the whole thing, whether or not these are actually significant elements themselves.

People generally don't recognize how long it takes to conceive, publish, and write a book.

People expect me to be dark and gloomy, then write that I'm a jolly chap, and after all, that is what I am. I think it's a case of an absolute romantic naivety that there should be a parallel between the work and the artist.

People get inspired to write, paint, draw, sing, sculpt, dance in many different ways. And there are many types of art. But the one thing that they all have in common is that they are all a sort of magic. Sometimes the magic flows from one’s fingers, other times it is transferred to the person who experiences the result. Magic has always worked in mysterious ways.

People going into a business have to have a plan. It's helpful to write it out, even if you're the only one there to see it and execute it. It's your bible. Stick to it, unless things happen in the market that cause you to change your plan. I do that myself.