Writing Quotes

I want to do some fiction writing, I've had some pretty good luck with short stories, I'd like to do a couple of larger things.

People say my music is English. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's not me writing English music, but that English music is becoming more like me.

The one ironclad rule is that I have to try. I have to walk into my writing room and pick up my pen every weekday morning.

Writing for the theater, you find yourself living a nocturnal life.

I'm trying my hand at writing. I'm writing a couple of projects for HBO, a half hour comedy and a miniseries.

It's time to start really writing some stuff, and I really wanted to write some stuff in the vein of the original Misfits, and this was really the first step in that direction.

I enjoy writing for third and fourth graders most of all.

Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very"; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

Writing is the supreme solace.

I'm addicted to creating and writing.

When I was a teenager, I got into SF, quite heavily, and that too has had a major impact on my writing.

Maybe I've lost a little, but I think everyone does over time. People have been writing that I'm getting old every year, and eventually they're going to be right. There's nobody in this game that's doing the same things they once did in the peak years of their career.

I'm not one of those writers I learned about who get up in the morning, put a piece of paper in their typewriter machine and start writing. That I've never understood.

I think training in comedy, as it were, a history writing comedy, is a powerful tool for anyone.

Writing seems to be more difficult as you move through the years.

If you're writing a piece for the Boston Pops, the balance is towards one end. If you're writing a piece for a chamber music society, then it's towards another point. I won't make a final answer on that. I think it changes with every piece.

You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length.

If we were truly in the studio making a record, it would have been more time consuming, and certainly I would have been more involved in the writing process.

I like to write first-person because I like to become the character I'm writing.

The whole point of diaries is that other people find them and read what you've put. I did once take to writing my inner thoughts on the computer at the end of other things I was writing and ended up faxing four pages of hideous stuff to my accountant so I don't do that now.

When I decided to take writing seriously, I did a lot of reading and analyzing of the books I liked, and came up with what I thought were pretty sound plotting and structure basics.

I got a book deal without even turning in one shred of a writing sample.

Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.

Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either.

It is not easy to get parts in mainstream films for most people of color. Hollywood and British writers are not writing parts for us, or the directors are not interested in casting us in parts that are color-blind.

I never think that anything I'm writing is bluntly political in any way. I'm not going for commentary.

What happens on 'Mad Men' in terms of the acting and the writing and the directing, it's superior. And yes, it has tremendous cache and buzz because it's become iconic, but it also deserves all the kudos and the awards as well, because it's a beautiful show to look at.

Novel writing is far and away the most exhausting work I know.

I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay, rather than the novel.

After I left Texas and went to California, I had a hard time getting anyone to play anything that I was writing, so I had to end up playing them myself. And that's how I ended up just being a saxophone player.