Down Quotes

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.

The creative act is like writing a letter. A letter is a project; you don't sit down to write a letter unless you know what you want to say and to whom you want to say it.

Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself - it is the occurring which is difficult.

There is both a skill factor and an effort factor in dream recall. People can develop dream recall skills, such as lying still in the morning and writing down whatever comes to mind.

That's what writing is all about, after all, making others see what you have put down on the page and believing that it does, or could, exist and you want to go there.

If a man writes a book, let him set down only what he knows. I have guesses enough of my own.

When I'm the one who sits down and looks at the blank page and writes it out all the way, then I'll call it my script.

Every author really wants to have letters printed in the papers. Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels.

The whole ecosystem of celebrity has broken down for writers. If you go back to the '50s, '60s, and '70s, writers were on TV a lot, and they were allowed to misbehave a lot.

I've discovered just how symbiotic the relationship is between writers, directors and actors. They ask the same questions and strip down texts in exactly the same way.

Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.

If you want to make an audience laugh, you dress a man up like an old lady and push her down the stairs. If you want to make comedy writers laugh, you push an actual old lady down the stairs.

It's a marvellous life, a gregarious life that we've had. We're very lucky in that way. Unlike writers or painters, we don't sit down in front of a blank canvas and say, 'How do I start? Where do I start?'

I kind of thought the writers were starting to take Taylor and make her kind of down and dirty.

But when I did think about it and looked at the whole package - the producers behind the show, the writers, the cast I would be working with - I would have been a fool to turn it down just because the role for me was another gay role.

I do not write by any set time schedule. I realize there are many writers who follow a daily regime where they arise at 6:00 a.m., do some sort of exercise, eat breakfast and then sit down and produce words for a three to four hour period.

I had a little epiphany when I was a writer at 'Chicago' magazine. I sat down to dinner at the Ritz-Carlton. Somebody poured a white dessert wine with chocolate cake. It was a wine I would never have expected to make sense. The idea of any wine tasting fabulous with chocolate cake was fascinating to me.

One truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language.

You know, as a writer, I'm more of a listener than a writer, cuz if I hear something I will write it down.

I did that for 40 years or more. I never had any writer's block. I got up in the morning, sat down at the typewriter - now, computer - lit up a cigarette.

I never really wanted to be an actor. And that was the beginning of it, I began to write things down and eventually became a writer on a television show.

A lot of very, very big stars were going down and not being seen or heard from again. Kirk took a huge chance in putting a blacklisted writer's name on the screen and somehow or other, he survived it, like he survives everything.

The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

Find enough clever things to say, and you're a Prime Minister; write them down and you're a Shakespeare.

For me, you have to not have a formula. You have to not even sit down and say, 'I want to write right now.' It has to just kind of come out. It's not something you can plan.

I think people who create and write, it actually does flow-just flows from into their head, into their hand, and they write it down. It's simple.

Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.

Always speak the truth, think before you speak, and write it down afterwards.

Somebody said to me, 'But the Beatles were anti-materialistic.' That's a huge myth. John and I literally used to sit down and say, 'Now, let's write a swimming pool.'