Best 30386 quotes in «writing quotes» category

At the time, I didn't know why, but I know now that when I was a little boy, I was scared to death of the Frankenstein films ... and in all these years later, I wanted it to come out with a happy ending, and I think it was my fear of the Frankenstein movies when I was 8 and 9 and 10 years old that made me want to write that story [Young Frankenstein].

At times, I get very lonely because people are afraid to talk to me or don't wait for me to write a response. I'm shy and tongue-tied at times. I find it difficult to talk to people who I don't know.

At university, I used to write silly little sketches and monologues, but never fiction.

A typical day for me is I get up at 6:00, the coffeemaker goes on automatically and the computer gets turned on. I pour a cup of coffee, listen to Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac, and then I write.

At this point in my life, I'm probably not gonna be able to stop writing because it's gonna help me be able to do what I need to do.

At this writing I can't even shut my lower jaw because of inadequate health care. I can't chew my food, I have trouble walking...the list goes on. But more than anything I want to go home. If you follow the laws at the time of my conviction I should have been released already.

At times of crisis or distress, it's poems that people turn to. (Poetry) still has a power to speak to people's feelings, maybe in a way that fiction, because it works in a longer way, can't. There's a little bit of your brain that mourns and grieves that you're not writing poetry, but actually as long as I'm writing something, I'm happy.

At times of writing I never think what I have said before. My aim is not to be consistent with my previous statements on a given question, but to be consistent with truth as it may present itself to me at a given moment. The result has been that I have grown from truth to truth.

At this rate, I'd be lucky if I wrote a page a day. Then I knew what the problem was. I needed experience. How could I write about life when I'd never had a love affair or a baby or even seen anybody die? A girl I knew had just won a prize for a short story about her adventures among the pygmies in Africa. How could I compete with that sort of thing?

At Ucross I learned that I am capable of focusing deeply for long periods of time. I love to write. I don't think I would have said that before this trip.

A typical day for me is I'm writing when I'm not directing.

Audiences are very sophisticated and they know the nuts and bolts of the genre - certainly with horror more than others I think. But they attract lots of people, they're much derided as a genre but people go and see them and they're not all dumb. There's some very clever horror films. Stephen King gets a lot of flack for not being a proper writer because he's a horror writer, but I think he writes some brilliant books. I think it's wrong to just bin it before looking at it.

Authors and lovers always suffer some infatuation, from which only absence can set them free.

Authors are magpies, echoing each other's words and seizing avidly on anything that glitters.

Authors have a greater right than any copyright, though it is generally unacknowledged or disregarded. They have a right to the reader's civility. There are favorable hours for reading a book, as for writing it, and to these the author has a claim. Yet many people think that when they buy a book they buy with it the right to abuse the author.

Authors do not choose a story to write, the story chooses us.

Authors are like cattle going to a fair: those of the same field can never move on without butting one another.

Authors have to write for their characters, for who they are, that's the strength of books. Don't worry about censors. Just write the story you need to tell and the rewards will come.

Authors of all races, be they Greeks, Romans, Teutons, or Celts, Can't seem just to say anything is the thing it is but have to go out of their way to say that it is like something else.

Authors who moan with praise for their editors always seem to reek slightly of the Stockholm syndrome.

Autobiography is not important. Authenticity is important. The writer must fire herself through the text, be the molten stuff that welds together disparate elements. I believe there is always exposure, vulnerability, in the writing process, which is not to say it is either confessional or memoir. Simply, it is real.

A veteran journalist has never had time to think twice before he writes.

Authors of so-called 'literary' fiction insist that action, like plot, is vulgar and unworthy of a true artist. Don't pay any attention to misguided advice of that sort. If you do, you will very likely starve trying to live on your writing income. Besides, the only writers who survive the ages are those who understand the need for action in a novel.

Authors were shy, unsociable creatures, atoning for their lack of social aptitude by inventing their own companions and conversations.

Authorship of any sort is a fantastic indulgence of the ego.

Autobiographical writings, essays, interviews, various other things... All the non-fiction prose I wanted to keep, that was the idea behind this collected volume, which came out about few years ago. I didn't think of Winter Journal, for example, as an autobiography, or a memoir. What it is is a literary work, composed of autobiographical fragments, but trying to attain, I hope, the effect of music.

Autobiographies, for the most part, to me, are like writing a love letter to yourself.

A very wise author once said that a writer writes for himself, and then publishes for money. I write for myself and publish just for the reader

A visual experience is vitalizing. Whereas to write great poetry, to draw continuously on one's inner life, is not merely exhausting, it is to keep alight a consuming fire.

Avoid all controversy in preaching, talking, or writing; preach nothing down but the devil, and nothing up but Jesus Christ.

Avoid theatrical flourishes - the phrases that sound so damned good that they stand up and beg to be recognized as "good writing," and therefore must be struck from the text.

Avoid the unhappy ending, the harsh, the brutal, the tragic, the horrible -- if you care to see in print things you write. (In this connection don't do as I do, but do as I say.

Awards are like hemorrhoids. Sooner or later every asshole gets one.

A whole army, though they can neither write nor read, are not afraid of a platform... therefore a whole army is afraid of one man.

A woman journalist in England asked me why Americans usually wrote about their childhood and a past that happened only in imagination, why they never wrote about the present. This bothered me until I realized why - that a novelist wants to know how it comes out, that he can't be omnipotent writing a book about the present, particularly this one.

A wise soul once declared that the ultimate power of the writer is that he has the choice of whom he wants to be co-opted by.

A word is used "correctly" when the average hearer will be affected by it in the way intended. This is a psychological, not a literary, definition of "correctness". The literary definition would substitute, for the average hearer, a person of high education living a long time ago; the purpose of this definition is to make it difficult to speak or write correctly.

A work of art is something produced by a person, but is not that person — it is of her, but is not her. It’s a reach, really — the artist is trying to inhabit, temporarily, a more compact, distilled, efficient, wittier, more true-seeing, precise version of herself — one that she can’t replicate in so-called ‘real’ life, no matter how hard she tries. That’s why she writes: to try and briefly be more than she truly is.

A woman who writes commits two sins; she increases the number of books, and decreases the number of women.

A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.

A writer can be compared to a well. There are as many kinds of wells as there are writers. The important thing is to have good water in the well, and it is better to take a regular amount out than to pump the well dry and wait for it to refill.

A writer can write in an attic, or on top of a bus. Or with a sharp stick in some wet cement. To act, an actor has to have words. A stage. a camera turning.

a writer doesn't only need the time when he's actually writing - he or she has got to have time to think and time just to let things work out. Nothing is worse for this than society. Nothing is worse for this than the abrasive, if enjoyable, effect of other people.

A writer either speaks to adults and bores kids, or speaks to kids and upsets adults.

A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is: when I speak of writing, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words.

A writer needs loneliness, and he gets his share of it. He needs love, and he gets shared and also unshared love. He needs friendship. In fact, he needs the universe. To be a writer is, in a sense, to be a day-dreamer - to be living a kind of double life.

A writers desire to write can only have come from previous experience of literature, and he'll start by imitating whatever he's read, which usually means what the people around him are writing.

A writer should be of as great probity and honesty as a priest of God. He is either honest or not, as a woman is either chaste or not, and after one piece of dishonest writing he is never the same again.

A writer should not so much write as embroider on paper; the work should be painstaking, laborious.

A writer who can't write in a grammerly manner better shut up shop.