Writing Quotes

Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text

You never write down to the people - you write the best you can with the hope that someone else will feel the same way.

I don't ever write with a particular audience in mind. I just write books that please me.

It's difficult to write a book where a character is on virtually every page of the book but you cannot refer to his or her gender. It gets rid of every his, her, she and he.

If you write a screenplay that gets circulated, you have a bigger readership than any literary novelist. And it's an educated audience as well.

When I started writing screenplays, as early as I started writing anything, I hadn't seen any ordinary screenplays. I saw movies and figured out how I thought they should be written.

I came into screenwriting from an odd direction, because the first screenplay that I read was and is better as writing than the top one percent of literary novels.

I always write as I like to write, and I've been thinking about it because I honestly didn't realize how different my stuff is, until I started looking at other people's scripts as a producer.

I never write with particular actors in mind.

When I'm shooting, as much as writing, I see edited footage in my mind, so I work that way, and it's economical.

You evolve in the ways in which you are precious. When you are the director, you are also continuing to write on the floor as you go along.

Saying directors don't write because they don't type is very wrong, it's like saying Dylan doesn't write music because he doesn't write notation.

I write drama in the English language. If I wasn't working in London I'd be doing something wrong.

We write to know we are not alone

There are dozens of great American writers who write about the family.

When I began to write seriously, 40 years ago now, my chosen form was the novel.

Writing is a vessel...with readers the ocean and authors as its sails.

So many people in the Western World are just automatically made ill by any sort of frank writing about sexual matters.

All writing is in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read heard overheard. What else?

When you're in Los Angeles, everybody you meet is writing a movie, and they want you to be in it. Every cab driver is writing a movie!

Cast aside any column about two subjects. It means the pundit chickened out on the hard decision about what to write about that day.

Why use a modifier to set straight a not-quite-right noun when the right noun is available?

By elevating your reading, you will improve your writing or at least tickle your thinking.

My work is writing, but my real work is being.

Even after you've won fame and fortune, every time you write you've got to write, there's no shortcut, you have to start your career all over again.

I began to write in the first place because I expected everything to change, and I wanted to have things in writing the way they had been. Just a little things, of course. A little of my little.

All I can do is write my stories for mankind, and rest easy.

Writers are a fascinating breed, because there are so many kinds of them, they are made by so many circumstances, conditions, and mysteries, and there are so many ways for writing to be done.

O, how I faint when I of you do write, Knowing a better spirit doth use your name, And in the praise thereof spends all his might To make me tongue-tied speaking of your fame.

Will Fortune never come with both hands full, But write her fair words still in foulest terms?

Write till your ink be dry, and with your tears Moist it again, and frame some feeling line That may discover such integrity.

Writing an acceptance speech gives you the expectation of winning, and you are therefore devastated or hurt if you didn't win.

I hate a style, as I do a garden, that is wholly flat and regular; that slides along like an eel, and never rises to what one can call an inequality.

A plain narrative of any remarkable fact, emphatically related, has a more striking effect without the author's comment.

My life's purpose is to write poetry - but behind the poetry must be the vision of a fresh revelation for men.

A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.

Style comes only have long, hard practice and writing.

[Ernest ]Hemingway always said, "Write about what you know." I think you can do that, and if you want to write about what you don't know, you can. It just takes a lot more work.

I feel like I'm almost ready to write fiction about the border. But even after 10 years of writing nonfiction about it, I don't think I know quite enough to do it right.

The trouble with the publishing business is that too many people who have half a mind to write a book do so.

Writing improves in direct ratio to the things we can keep out of it that shouldn't be there.

My four articles of faith: clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity.

Writing and learning and thinking are the same process.

Be grateful for every word you can cut.

Writing is thinking on paper. Anyone who thinks clearly should be able to write clearly-about any subject at all.

Writing is hard work.

A writer is always working.

I have no interest in teaching writers how to sell. I want to teach them how to write. If the process is sound, the product will take care of itself, and sales are likely to follow.

No one has something original or important to say will willing we run the risk of being misunderstood; people who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief

Much of my writing has taken the form of a pilgrimage: to sacred places that represent the best of America, to musicians and other artists who represent the best of their art.