Best 30386 quotes in «writing quotes» category

Changing writing styles is like an actor taking on a different part.

Character is plot, plot is character.

Characters make their own plot. The dimensions of the characters determine the action of the novel.

Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write more entirely out of yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page.

Character gives us qualities, but it is in our actions — what we do — that we are happy or the reverse.

Characters last. Beautiful writing lasts. A compelling narrative lasts. Art survives long after ideas go extinct.

Characters simply come and find me. They sit down, I offer them a coffee. They tell me their story and then they almost always leave. When a character, after drinking some coffee and briefly telling her story, wants dinner and then a place to sleep and then breakfast and so on, for me the time has come to write the novel.

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.

Character is character and voice is voice, which translates nicely from writing novels to writing TV. But the process is different. You have a writer's room, people pitch you jokes and you collaborate.

Characters aren't a fling. They aren't a one-night stand. Getting to know them takes time and hard work. It takes excessive free writes and multiple experiments.

Characters more or less present themselves to me. I don't know their origins. I think if I did, if I seemed to myself to fabricate them, I could not induce suspension of disbelief in myself in the way writing fiction requires.

Characters who are absolutely sure about what they do, who plunge ahead without fear, are not that interesting. We don’t go through life that way. In reality, we have doubts just like everyone else. Bringing your Lead’s doubts to the surface in your plot pulls the reader deeper into the story, and this is an excellent way to coax the reader to lose himself in the story world you’re about to create.

Charlie Marlowe never wrote horror, but somehow horror was writing Charlie Marlowe.

Charles Graner is certainly guilty of terrible misjudgment. There's always a double standard. Everyone was happy to go to Graner's trial and write stories about how bad he is. And he is. But every time he tried to get an officer to testify, the officer either would invoke the Fifth Amendment or the judge would refuse to allow him to testify. We really didn't air out the issues.

Chats are so new to newspapers, historically. But they're so incredibly valuable because editors/reporters/columnists get to find out what's on the minds of our readers, what you think we should be writing about, what ticks you off, what makes you happy. Sometimes it can confirm what you think readers are interested in; sometimes it can turn you around 180 degrees.

Charles Dickens was an incredibly cinematic writer. He wrote this one hundred years before there were movies. He writes very thematically. It is amazing.

Childhood is not a race to see how quickly a child can read, write and count. It is a small window of time to learn and develop at the pace that is right for each individual child. Earlier is not better.

Cheryl Cole, if you're reading this, I may not be as prety as you but at least I write my own songs.

Chicago is many things to many people, and to me, it is a place where you can write.

Chief Justice [John] Roberts compared judges to umpires, who apply rules they did not write and cannot change to the competition before them.

Children can write poetry and then, unless they're poets, they stop when reach puberty.

Children do not learn in school; they are babysat. It takes maybe 50 hours to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. After that, students can teach themselves. Mainly what school does is to keep the children off the streets and out of the job market.

Children can't help but create: they need to put their mind on the page, they want to paint, to sculpt, to write short stories.

Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods.

Children read books, not reviews. They don't give a hoot about critics.

Children should learn to draw as they learn to write, and such a mystery should not be made of it. They should be encouraged, not flattered... then [later in life] double the effort is required to get the facility which might have been gained insensibly.

[Children] would have messed up my apartment. In the main, they are ungrateful. They would have siphoned too much time away from the writing of my precious books.

Childrens books change lives. Stories pour into the hearts of children and help make them what they become.

Children live in a way that is very generous. They learn from a young age what you value; they watch your every move. If you value writing, they will learn quickly to value it too, as something they can give to someone, or receive with pleasure from someone else.

Children's book writers tend to feel quite superior, and adult writers tend to feel they wouldn't know how to write a children's book - which might surprise you because I think a lot of people think it's the other way around.

China is completely lacking in self-awareness and as someone who has stepped outside that society, I have a responsibility to write about it as I see it.

Chris Claremont once said of Alan Moore, "if he could plot, we'd all have to get together and kill him." Which utterly misses the most compelling part of Alan's writing, the way he develops and expresses ideas and character. Plot does not define story. Plot is the framework within which ideas are explored and personalities and relationships are unfolded.

Chomsky proceeds on the almost unthinkably subversive assumption that the United States should be judged by the same standards that it preaches (often at gunpoint) to other nations he is nearly the only person now writing who assumes a single standard of international morality not for rhetorical effect, but as a matter of habitual, practically instinctual conviction.

Choreography is writing on your feet.

Choose your tools carefully, but not so carefully that you get uptight or spend more time at the stationery store than at your writing table.

Choosing writing as a career, just by itself, is a measure of not being a calculating person.

Christians always write to me threatening me with Hell. Strange how they think this vindicates them and their religion. Threats are the hallmark of a wicked creed.

Christ is the Word of God in person. The Bible is the Word of God in writing. Both are the Word of God in the words of men. Both have a human nature and a divine nature.

Christmas is a time of little time. How we get there is a mystery. Racing madly mall-to-mall, we climb Into fields of sunlit harmony. Shopping, cooking, clearing walks and yards, Trimming house and tree while working, too; Making phone calls, wrapping, writing cards, As all worn out we do what we must do So that this day of joy might joy renew.

Christmas poem to a man in jail hello Bill Abbott: I appreciate your passing around my books in jail there, my poems and stories. if I can lighten the load for some of those guys with my books, fine. but literature, you know, is difficult for the average man to assimilate (and for the unaverage man too); I don't like most poetry, for example, so I write mine the way I like to read it.

Churchill wrote his own speeches. When a leader does that, he becomes emotionally invested with his utterances...If Churchill had had a speech write in 1940, Britain would be speaking German today.

Cinema, which is influenced by every single part of life, is direct and reaches you immediately. And writing - the best writing is complex ideas communicated concisely. And music - if it's a good tune, make sure people can bloody hear it!

Clarity in language depends on clarity in thought.

Clary screamed out loud as he fell like a stone- And landed lightly on his feet just in front of her. Clary stared with her mouth open as he rose up out of a shallow crouch and grinned at her. "If I made a joke about just dropping in," he said, "would you write me off as a cliché?

Clear thinking becomes clear writing; one can't exist without the other.

Clear writing is universal. People talk about writing down to an audience or writing up to an audience; I think that's nonsense. If you write in a way that is clear, transparent, and elegant, it will reach everyone.

Clearly the work of a master teacher who has deep knowledge of his subject and enormous empathy for his students and his readers.

Clear writers, like fountains, do not seem so deep as they are; the turbid look the most profound.

Claude Hopkins.. maintained that nobody with a college education could write an advertisement addressed to the mass millions. That's absolute poppycock.

Clearly, one does not have to give up being an academic, retreat from rigorous research, or renounce the importance of specialization in order to address major social issues. I don't think you give up theoretical rigor by writing in a way that addresses major social concerns and is at the same time accessible to wider informed general audiences.