Writing Quotes

Form is never more than an extension of content.

But the idea of a man making his living by writing seemed, in that hardy environment, so fantastic that even today I am sometimes myself assailed by a feeling of unreality.

It seems to me that many writers, by virtue of environments of culture, art and education, slip into writing because of their environments.

Writing a poem is discovering.

Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes the pressure off the second.

Never discuss the poem you contemplate writing. It's like turning on the outside spigot. It takes all the pressure off the upstairs bathroom.

All there is to writing is having ideas. To learn to write is to learn to have ideas.

I didn't like writing just articles and things. So then I wandered around. I tried my hand at film and television and that was a worse fit because I don't really have a mind for that.

At the top of the cycle you write policies for everybody, no matter how bad, and at the bottom you cancel everybody, no matter how good. It's a manic-depressive cycle.

Every morning or afternoon, whenever you want to write, you have to go up and shoot that old bear under your desk between the eyes.

There is no screenplay-writing recipe that guarantees your cake will rise.

When you do enough research, the story almost writes itself. Lines of development spring loose and you'll have choices galore.

Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.

I considered going to film school; I took a course in film and was very interested in filmmaking as well as film writing.

A good writer writes with a camera, not a pen.

I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

One does not consider style, because style is.

I think of the author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, 'I will tell you a story' and then he passes the hat.

There can be a science to joke writing, there are certainly rules and patterns that can be followed, but I think most of the best comedy goes beyond the rules.

I write songs like "The Sweetest Love." Of course I'm a little cheesy. Love is cheesy. Love is corny. But it's also the greatest feeling in the whole world.

Sometimes I write songs that just come out in a pop format because I grew up on melody and these amazing artists during the 80s. It's my tradition and it's something that I can't really control.

I choose to think of tv audience as nameless, formless, faceless people who are all like me. And anything that I write, if I like it, they'll like it.

I don't feel, God dictated that I should write.

You can be a hunchback and a dwarf and what-all. If you write beautifully, you can write beautifully.

I don't know what my friends do. Generally they become producers. That way they can stop writing!

Just write, get better, keep writing, keep getting better. It's the only thing you can control.

When we use a language, we should commit ourselves to knowing it, being able to read it, and writing it idiomatically.

Poetry is when you make new things familiar and familiar things new

Writing is a strange synthesis between the two parts of your mind: the analytical side and the side that knows nothing at all, and you have to allow the dreaming side free rein.

Learn from cinema. Be economic with descriptions. Sort out the telling detail from the lifeless one. Write dialogue that people would actually speak.

Many of us write because we are readers and have grown up in a long tradition, and we want to be able to add to that extraordinary flow of interpretations of the world.

It's gut instinct that helps me determine how to write a story. I love the surreal because I am faced with the challenge of making the unbelievable believable. That challenge is thrilling.

Having the urge to write is one thing; acting on it is another.

One day you will take me completely out of myself, I'll do what the angels cannot do. Your eyelash will write on my cheek the poem that hasn't been thought of.

The best thing about writing programs is that it rationalized the apprenticeship of a writer.

Although I still occasionally paint and draw, my life has now been shaped by my writing.

And out of a desire essentially to imitate what I was reading, I began to write, like a clever monkey.

One aspect of appellate judging is we have to give reasons for all of our decisions. And when you sit down and try to write it out, sometimes you find that your first judgment wasn't the right one.

When I start writing novels, I go into them with a spirit of inquiry, rather than to substantiate prejudices I had in the beginning. If you don't do that, you can't write good characters.

The world is full of novels in which characters simply say and do. There are certainly legitimate genres in which this is sufficient. But in real and lasting writing the character is.

I go straight from thinking about my narrator to being him.

I had art as a major, along with English, French and History. I had dance, modern dance. In English I was allowed to write my own poetry, which I eventually got published.

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

The way you write a screenplay is that you close your eyes and run the movie in your head and then you write it down.

I think without writing I would feel completely useless.

They say the test of literary power is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, "Can he name a kitten?"

They say the test of [literary power] is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, "Can he name a kitten?" And by this test I am condemned, for I cannot.

Abuse is often of service. There is nothing so dangerous to an author as silence.

A man will turn over half a library to make one book.

Those who will not take the trouble to think for themselves, have always somebody that thinks for them; and the difficulty in writing is to please those from whom others learn to be pleased.