Writing Quotes

Once I had all the facts in, I found I didn't have the immoral courage to pull the caper. So I wrote it as a story. As a teenager, I didn't have any skills for writing as such, so it came out in 1500 words.

Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything.

I'd be happy to do Star Trek again, if the writing was right.

Poets deal in writing about feelings and trying to find the language and images for intense feelings.

I just love writing. It's magical, it's somewhere else to go, it's somewhere much more dreadful, somewhere much more exciting. Somewhere I feel I belong, possibly more than in the so-called real world.

When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on.

You can have good writing, but a great actor will make it feel and sound like great writing. You can have great writing, and mediocre actors will make it feel mediocre. Without the actors, you have nothing.

I had neither expert aid nor advice. I studied no courses in writing; until a year or so ago, I never read a book by anybody advising writers how to write.

All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.

Yes, sometimes I think that all my writing is nothing more than the compensatory work of a frustrated painter.

I have been writing for 50 years and readers still read my first book from when I was in the Marine Corps.

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

If I don't feel like writing today or for a few days, I don't. And I don't think about it. It is not an obligation-it is the greatest privilege.

I am a drinker with writing problems.

I think if you're writing from the heart, very often, the subject matter will adjust as you age... but you try to write the best song you can possibly write. For us, we have the same basic elements that make up the America sound.

Writing this record let me recapture who I am. It is summed up in the title Be Not Nobody. You need to feel comfortable in your skin and do whatever you need to do for yourself, to heal or to grow.

I've loved doing "E.R." for the quality of the writing and the great people I get to work with.

Writing this book was very therapeutic because it helped me face my relationship with my dad.

The process of creating is related to the process of dreaming although when you are writing you're doing it and when you're dreaming, it's doing you.

It's rather fun writing a female spy, because she has so much more kit. Bond never carried a hair dryer or a makeup bag. And he certainly didn't wear an uplift bra.

I suppose directing on set is the most fun because it's a good crack and you feel you're on the battlefield whereas writing is a fairly solitary undertaking.

I look for ambiguity when I'm writing because life is ambiguous.

Forgive me for not writing but this man is exhausting.

Foreman told Ray to plead guilty and he'd then give his brother $500, if Ray didn't cause any problems at the guilty plea hearing, and he could take that $500 and hire a lawyer to set aside the plea. Foreman actually put that in writing.

As a piece of literacy criticism, Freud's best writing is about Dostoyevsky. It's a kind of displaced literacy criticism.

I never discuss a novel while I'm writing it, for fear that talking about it will diminish my desire to write it.

In 2008, I was more just thinking about using the touchscreen for writing the songs. From there I started thinking about how I visualised music.

I can't remove the autobiographical slant from the things I write. You always bring yourself into what you're writing.

I think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not nuclear physics. It actually has to give pleasure or it is worth nothing.

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.