Best 30386 quotes in «writing quotes» category

When you're just writing, you can do anything with it. But with TV, you've gotta work within certain budget constraints, so you've got to pick and choose your battles.

When you're reading, you're not where you are; you're in the book. By the same token, I can write anywhere.

When you're rich, you don't write checks. Straight cash, homey.

When you're sitting down and you're blocked and you just start writing and something in your mind just clicks, you start seeing connections and so on, you really do feel like you're channeling something else.

When you're playing such brilliant music every day, then the last thing you ever want to do is try to write something of your own that's crude and not as good.

When you're researching things that have happened, the clear narrative arc is not there already. This is the problem of writing nonfiction for me - writing nonfiction which is about serious subjects and has serious political and social points to make, yet which is meant to be popular to a degree - what happens when the facts don't fit a convenient narrative arc? I guess that for a lot of nonfiction writers that is a central challenge.

When you're on the set, and sometimes, because it's been so complex and the writers have been really writing, sometimes up until the last minute... And you kind of sit back; you separate yourself from your brain, and you say, let me see if you can do this. And that's the kind of challenge I like.

When you're trying to create a career as a writer, a little delusional thinking goes a long way.

When you're on a staff, it's not your job to write what you think is funny. It's your job to write what the person who created the show thinks is funny.

When you're spending that much time by yourself in your car looking at landscapes, it's desolate. Most of the other people around you are invisible in their own cars. You're driving past houses where maybe once in a while somebody is out, but that's about it. So I was interested in that aesthetic and I decided I wanted to write an apocalyptic narrative, but the more I thought of it, it seemed bizarre and untenable to me to pick one, so I just didn't.

When you're teaching creative nonfiction, it helps to have written about your life in a very open way, because you can say, 'Look, how much are you willing to risk emotionally to write? How careful can you be with the other people you're writing about?

When you're (traveling) with someone else, you share each discovery, but when you are alone, you have to carry each experience with you like a secret, something you have to write on your heart, because there's no other way to preserve it.

When you're writing a 25-minute episode that can be anything, sometimes you just start with a character, and you let them walk into the room. Then you let your instinct guide you. That's how we made art when we were 15 years old. And that's so fun to us.

When you're writing a story or an actor playing a role, you should never think of your characters as heroes or villains. You have to think of them as people first.

When you're writing something new, writing something that's your own, basically you have nothing else to do except either invent a trick, use someone else's trick, or have no trick and get a bad performance.

When you're writing TV or movies your vernacular is time, it's all based on rhythms, a character takes a beat or two characters have a moment, like everything is about time. And when you're writing a comic, everything is about space. It's how many panels to put on a page, when should you do a full page splash, what is the detail that you see in any particular image.

When you're writing you're constantly fighting demons to sit down and do what you do. If you listen to the voices outside your head, in addition to the ones inside your head, you'll never get anything done. There's enough inner strife.

When you're young, your perception of what it means to be a writer is often less about the writing and more about what seems to be the accompanying life: speeches and travel and hanging out with other writers. You think that when you get published, your life will clarify itself to you somehow. But when you don't get published until you're middle-aged you know who you are already, and your life expands to make room for your writing, rather than orbiting around it. You realize that there's no one way to be a writer, and that the job is less of an identity and more of a vocation.

When you're working on a television show with actors, what you hope you're doing is playing jazz with them all the time. You see what they're giving you, so you try to write back to that, and then they play with that, and you get a sense of what is going on. That's just a natural way in which TV series usually work.

When you're writing a novel, you're still telling a story. But you're telling it very differently. It's a craft like anything else.

When you're writing a story in bits and pieces, month in and month out, there really isn't time or space for reflection, no room to learn what those scripts had to teach you.

When you're writing for newspapers you have all these parameters. You can't swear, you have to use short paragraphs, all that. If you stay within those parameters, you have lots of freedom because you're writing for the next day.

When you're writing it's a very solitary job. It's you and your word processor and a cup of tea. It's nice- that again, is another nice thing about being able to do commercials is, you can get out of the house and chase high speed cars around for a few days and then by the time you go back, you're kind of re-infused to write.

When you're writing non-fiction, you go as far as you can go, and then ethically you have to stop. You can't go. You can't suppose. You can't imagine. And I think there's something in human nature that wants to finish the story.

When you're writing something, and you're putting yourself out there, or you're performing and someone comes in and savages that, then of course it feels personal. It doesn't feel like it's just business, because there's no business - it's not like we're conducting business, this anonymous critic and I. It's just that this person is tearing me a new asshole.

When you're writing - when I'm writing anyway - I'm writing out of different kinds of preoccupations and obsessions, different forms of drivenness, and so you're really hostage those while writing. I am, anyway. And it's only when you finally take the finished thing out of the furnace that you see what it was that went into the making of the thing.

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.

When you're writing, you're demented, alone, and full of doubt. It feels dangerous.

When you're writing, you're only a brain and some fingers, but drumming, you're involving all four limbs, and you're hearing stuff and you're converting your ideas into physical motions, getting physical feedback from things you are touching - it's pretty cool. It's a really a nice contrast to writing.

When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.

When you're working with a smaller budget I suppose one of the things that has to be in your mind when you are writing is that you have to keep the characters down to a minimum.

When you're writing a script you have the option to embellish on life or switch the order of events or make it generally more cinematic. I would stick too closely to my own experience and not necessarily think about the fact that it needs to have an event happen. Realising that I could channel my own experience into a story that was slightly more cinematic was a very important moment for me - allowing myself to accept that the kind of screenwriting I'm doing is a work of fiction.

When you're writing fiction, you don't have notes necessarily. You don't carve it, it's not like a piece of sculpture, it's more like water color.

When you're writing for the New York Times someone reading it knows the topic better than you do and knows when you've messed up.

When you're writing is when the "god should I just drop this" feeling can hit. When you're editing is when the "god this is awful and I've wasted everyone's time and money and will be revealed as a fraud" feeling can hit.

When you're writing, your mind has a place where the stories happen. With one word, you can get the idea of where you are.

When you're writing a book, it's rather like going on a very long walk, across valleys and mountains and things [...] The highest mountain on the walk is obviously the end of the book, because it's got to be the best view of all, when everything comes together and you can look back and see that everything you've done all ties up. But it's a very, very long, slow process.

When you're writing a book, you don't want it to be overly trendy because you want people to enjoy it for years and refer back to it.

When you're writing fiction it's a heightened voice. You're trying to cast a spell, which isn't the same thing as trying to cast someone into it. You are creating a reality but it's a different sort of performance.

When you're writing for theater or TV, it's open-ended in scope. You can write 10 separate pieces that are really effective but have no place on a rock record or whatever.

When you're writing for the screen, you have to be hyper-conscious every moment of how the audience is going to react. If you write just one scene where the audience is confused or it breaks their concentration in some way, then you've lost them, and you might never get them back.

When you're writing, it's rather like going on a very long walk

When you're writing something and you know it's good, you get flushed, you can feel the blood coursing through your veins, you feel alive, all your nerve endings stand up, something just clicks.

When you're writing theology, you have to say everything all the time, otherwise people think you've deliberately missed something out.

When you're writing, you are robbed of your delivery.

When you're writing, you're making decisions about compression and the shape of a life, which are very similar to how we experience our inner consciousness.

When you're writing you're trying to find out something which you don't know.

When you're younger and a little more innocent, you write whatever [lyrics] comes naturally. But as you get used to writing you try to steer the sound and music to different music and throwing in the "kitchen sink" of sorts into the music. With that way, you end up putting in much more than before and you could even make much more next time around.

When you're writing a movie or a play and writing isn't going well, which is for me the normal condition - it's an exceptional day when suddenly I've got something and it's going well - you can call the studio or the producer or whoever is waiting for it and say, "I know I said I was going to have it in by the end of the summer.

When you're writing a screenplay every scene needs to change from positive to negative, or negative to positive, and constantly trying to change the values of the movie.