Writing Quotes

I like to begin every screenplay with a burst of delusional self-confidence. It tends to fade pretty quickly, but for me, at least, there doesn't seem to be any other way to start writing a script.

How I work is that I write a story I'd like to read. Then you fly to Paris or Sydney and the interviewers talk about the greater significance of your work.

I started writing hits the day I sold my piano.

When finished writing a post, go back and add bullets, sub heads, spacing; eliminate long paragraphs or sentences.

There is perhaps no more obvious vanity than to write of it so vainly.

I seat myself at the typewriter and hope, and lurk.

There are men that will make you books, and turn them loose into the world, with as much dispatch as they would do a dish of fritters.

My work...is to shatter the faith of men here, there, and everywhere, faith in affirmation, faith in negation, and faith in abstention from faith, and this for the sake of faith in faith itself.

What is writing, no matter how lavish the pieces, if it says nothing of the truth, cares little for the heart, and is merely subservient to the pleasure of showing one's brilliance.

It's absolutely fatal to your writing to think about how your work will be received. It's a betrayal of whatever talent you have.

I wake up early in the morning and walk for an hour. If I have something to write, I prefer to write in the morning until midday, and in the afternoon, I eat.

I started writing In Darkness out of a frustration of the quality of roles that I was reading in scripts for women.

That's very nice if they want to publish you, but don't pay too much attention to it. It will toss you away. Just continue to write.

Write your own songs. It helps you to mean what you're singing, which will then make it mean something to listeners.

I don't play an instrument - I just write in my head, and I usually hear fully formed songs. 'We Are Young' turned out so much like it was in my head. But it also exceeded all my expectations.

The act of writing is a kind of catharsis, a liberation, but I never really concerned myself with that. I write because it interests me.

Remember this always: The living of your own life writes the book of your most sacred truth, and offers evidence of it.

To start writing about your life is, from one standpoint, to stop living it. You must avoid adventures today so as to make time for registering those of yesterday.

Because, if one is writing novels today, concentrating on the beauty of the prose is right up there with concentrating on your semi-colons, for wasted effort.

Great, big, serious novels always get awards. If it's a battle between a great, big, serious novel and a funny novel, the funny novel is doomed.

I've seen some great write ups and I emailed her the other night because I saw her on an awards show recently.

Sunday afternoon is for papers and writing.

Publishing is a business. Writing may be art, but publishing, when all is said and done, comes down to dollars.

I write songs from the point of view I had at a time;I'm not tryingto write songs from a young person's point of view.That only ends in disaster.

I'm unable to really write the kind of song that doesn't have a visual element, which most songs don't.

One good reason for writing novels based on your life is that you have something to read in old age when you've forgotten what happened.

A writer's work may be a coded autobiography, but only a very close friend could decipher it.

I don't care who you are. When you sit down to write the first page of your screenplay, in your head, you're also writing your Oscar acceptance speech.

I don't think you can write - at least not well - if you don't love stories, love the written word.

Most of my writing consists of an attempt to translate aphorisms into continuous prose.

There comes a time when every scientist, even God, has to write off an experiment.

Perfect objectivity is always impossible, no matter who writes a person's biography.

Reading is the most rewarding form of exile and the most necessary discipline for novelists who burn with the ambition to get better.

Don't be afraid to write crap - it makes the best fertilizer. The more you write the better your chances of growing something wonderful.

No memoirists writes for long without experiencing an unsettling disbelief about the reliability of memory, a hunch that memory is not, after all, just memory.

Writing is so hard. And then, sometimes, it is so bewilderingly easy.

So I find the fascination, the love, the incredible skill and everything to do with acting, writing plays, and doing them, just darling. Lovely. I love actors.

When you're No. 1 or No. 300, you still get to play and write the songs.

Somehow I started introducing writing into my drawings, and after a time, the language took over and I started getting very involved with the handwriting and then the look of the handwriting.

Blanche is written with a terrible authority, the authority that comes from artistic necessity when the writer is compelled to write by his demon, rather than by his agent or promoter.

I don't write to put it in a drawer, I hope that people see it.

Adam Berenson knows how to compose, organize an ensemble, do musical research, play solo and trio piano, write for musical journals, and enlist others to his cause. A very fine musician.

People joked that Forster became more renowned with every book he did not write.

Not every song I write is ecstasy. And it can happen only one time. After that, when you sing the same melody and words, it's pleasure, but you don't get wiped out.

There is a difference if we see something with a pencil in our hand or without one.

I write from my soul. This is the reason that critics don't hurt me, because it is me.

Since writing JAWS, I've been lucky enough to do close to forty television shows about wildlife in the oceans, and yes, I have been attacked by sea creatures once in a while.

Writers let themselves be enticed by the language.

I'd rather live precariously in my own office than comfortably in somebody else's.

If I'm not at my study by 10:00, 10:30, forget it, I can't write a word.