Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Artists don't talk about art. Artists talk about work. If I have anything to say to young writers, it's stop thinking of writing as art. Think of it as work.
And I used to write novels and little stories and compositions and I - but I put them away because I started acting when I was 17. So there wasn't much time.
I think there is a rage against women. I've come to see that now although at the time I did not notice it. I was preoccupied with my teaching and my writing.
As an actor, you are in a unique position because you’re not only memorizing dialogue but really embodying it. You naturally feel the rhythm of good writing.
I'm always very conscious because I like to give time between records, even though I feel like I write music that will last it's time, whatever time that is.
If you have something to say, here's what you do: You write it down on a piece of paper, you go out in the lobby, and then you go home and you kill yourself.
To me and my band, guitar riffs are what it's all about. We know that every time we jam on a great riff, we've got a fighting chance of writing a great song!
I have always been fascinated by dark and mysterious stuff. I guess I have a pretty dark and gloomy side. Writing songs saves me from going completely gonzo.
The less self-conscious you are about what you are about, the better in a way, that is to say technically. You have to get it in your blood, not in the head.
A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.
I am going to tell you a secret. Everything is about wanting. Everything. Things happen because of people wanting. Watch closely, and you’ll see what I mean.
If anything I try to write something that would be more difficult to film. I tend to see film as competition and would like instead to do what books do best.
The first time I went to Wales I thought I'd landed in a land of hobbits. Everybody was really small and the houses were small and the writing was backwards.
One thing we do really well on Archer and one thing I've always tried to do in my comedy and my writing and my podcast is to never speak down to my audience.
I'm not much interested in prizes, whether from the Arab world or from the Western world. Writing is a very difficult process and I want to continue my work.
Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh; they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as easily killed off.
Every time an adult is going to write something for a teenager and you don't have, physically, a person who is that, you are always going to be a little off.
Make sure you're realistic about what you can do, but if you have a good lead with something, making the plunge into full-time writing is the only way to go.
Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills, and meaningless jargon.
To me, it's all about the song. Songs are what make me excited. You hear a great song and you want to record it or get a great idea and you want to write it.
I can't think of a recent baseball song except John Fogerty's Centerfield. It's very difficult to write a baseball song that pleases fans and non-fans alike.
Judging from the letters I've received from obviously feeble-minded persons who wish I would write another These Old Shades, it ought to sell like hot cakes.
I write screenplays that don't get made and pilots that don't get picked up, and I re-write other people's movies, and those are all different kinds of fees.
Isn't it mysterious to begin a new journal like this? I can run my fingers through the fresh clean pages but I cannot guess what the writing on them will be.
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.
People would say, Can we develop a sitcom around you? and I would say, Not interested. I'm very happy doing standup and writing and taking my kids to school.
Eventually the writing takes time. What I want to do is get the story down and I want to know what happens as I write my way into the knowledge of the story.
Yeah, I know what your English Professor tried to tell you. But if your English Professor could make a living writing fiction, they would have been doing it.
If you're a freelance writer and aren't used to being ignored, neglected, and generally given short shrift, you must not have been in the business very long.
You can take for granted that people know more or less what a street, a shop, a beach, a sky, an oak tree look like. Tell them what makes this one different.
Perfume is a form of writing, an ink, a choice made in the first person, the dot on the i, a weapon, a courteous gesture, part of the instant, a consequence.
I think one of the biggest mistakes you can make as a writer is to follow your initial [writing] plan too stringently. A story needs room to grow and evolve.
I have so many other interests: Writing, acting, directing, real life, I need little pieces of it all to satisfy me. The thirst is deep and I am complicated.
Success comes to a writer as a rule, so gradually that it is always something of a shock to him to look back and realize the heights to which he has climbed.
When I write, I love finding connections between ideas. When the connections are plentiful and strong, then I know it's a pretty good subject to write about.
The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men's genius.
For writing, I get up early in the morning - 5 o'clock, 4:30. I'm a morning person... So I try to do it while people are asleep. The mornings are the nicest.
When I first started writing, a friend said I should be careful because I'm letting people know how to reach right in and play with my workings. And they do!
I wasn't aware I'd write the novel when I wrote the New Yorker story either. And the narration of their construction in 10:04 is fiction, however flickering.
Write for the love of your art. Someplace down the road, the money, the fame, they'll come, but by that time you won't be thinking in terms of money or fame.
They said I would never write this book. Well, f**k ’em – ’cos here it is. All I have to do now is remember something... Bollocks. I can’t remember anything.
There isn't much political coloration in my economic writing; it's not surprising that few people know my political views. They really aren't very important.
My family is number one in my life. I'll blow off writing or just about anything to make sure I take my son to preschool or watch him at his swimming lesson.
Sometimes I do get writer's block but it's more of a writer's doubt - I'll try and write but nothing goes anywhere because I start thinking everything sucks.
Writing a novel is like knocking on a door that will never open. You are so desperate to get in, you will say or do anything. You feel: please take my novel.
And I'm a slow writer: five, six hundred words is a good day. That's the reason it took me 20 years to write those million and a half words of the Civil War.
The Stolen and Perverted Writings of Homer & Ovid, of Plato & Cicero, which all men ought to contemn, are set up by artifice against the Sublime of the Bible
You do not write a novel for praise, or thinking of your audience. You write for yourself; you work out between you and your pen the things that intrigue you
I was always drawn to Broadway musicals, and obviously composers like Gershwin, Rodgers, Berlin and Porter were writing music that I found wildly impressive.
The career of a writer is comparable to that of a woman of easy virtue. You write first for pleasure, later for the pleasure of others and finally for money.