Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
That's where everything starts, as an actor: you've gotta have great writing and great character development, and then you have really great materials to work from.
That is one of the reasons I write: to feel the Presence of God and know He is speaking to me in a very personal way, instructing me, correcting me, redirecting me.
If you like to tell stories and compose sentences, and if you work hard at being good at these things, then you are a writer even if you haven't published anything.
If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another.
A lot of times you get people writing wonderful sentences and paragraphs, and they fall in love with their prose style, but the stories really aren't that terrific.
W.S Merwin says "after three days of rain" and I write "After Twelve Days of Rain." I like his quietude. I admire his ability to be simple without being simplistic.
When I'm writing, I am trying to find out who I am, who we are, what we're capable of, how we feel, how we lose and stand up, and go on from darkness into darkness.
If you put anger in the writing, then it's like an actor crying on stage. The audience will not cry with the actor and in some way inure itself against the emotion.
Everything vanishes around me, and works are born as if out of the void. Ripe, graphic fruits fall off. My hand has become the obedient instrument of a remote will.
Writing is a solitary pursuit and I think you have to be partially at peace with yourself, but it's the other part that's usually producing the stuff worth reading.
I've been writing about James Fenimore Cooper. He was not a writer. Here was a man who was 30 years old and had never put anything more than his signature on paper.
You go to movies to see people you love suffer - that's why you go to the movies. You don't go to see a movie about a guy who already knows he has a wonderful life.
The first fiction I ever wrote was short stories. I was writing short stories in my late teens and early twenties, and I think it's how you teach yourself to write.
You can get into a comfort zone writing lyrics, like wearing a mask. But I wanted to feel uncomfortable when I was listening back to the lyrics; I wanted to squirm.
I write separately from the inking up. I'm sure this varies from cartoonist to cartoonist; I find that the writing is the hard part and the drawing is the fun part.
Often times, I'm surprised by what I'm writing or what I'm playing, and then that inspires me to keep going with it, so it ends up being a very adventurous process.
I've always looked upon the Ducks as caricature human beings. Perhaps I've been years writing in that middle world that J.R.R. Tolkien describes, and never knew it.
It's weird. People want you to know that they write. They want you to know they're a musician, rather than making music or making stories. It's the strangest thing.
Don't leave you to go find your point of view and your story. You are all you have been given . . . this is who you are, and from where you ought and need to write.
I have now attained the true art of letter-writing, which we are always told, is to express on paper exactly what one would say to the same person by word of mouth.
Did you ever find that there is room between the two opposing rules of a paradox? That space between two almost opposite rules is the ground where I play and write.
Men are thinking, writing, and creating, because women were pouring their energy into those men; women are not creating culture because they are occupied with love.
To write history one must be more than a man, since the author who holds the pen of this great justiciary must be free from all preoccupation of interest or vanity.
[Lord Brougham's writings on the bee's cell contain] as striking examples of bad reasoning as are often to be met with in writings related to mathematical subjects.
In our office, we have a whiteboard with all of our ideas and things we want to write on it - great ideas we have that we haven't had the time to get around to yet.
Sometimes I'll get a burst when I write lyrics, it usually happens in 20 minutes and I'll write the whole song, and that's really the only way it feels comfortable.
It's hard for me to believe that people who read very little (or not at all in some cases) should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written.
When I sit down to write a book, I do not know where the energy and the words come from. I just sit down, and soon it is flowing through my hand and onto the paper.
Novelists do not write as birds sing, by the push of nature. It is part of the job that there should be much routine and some daily stuff on the level of carpentry.
You write by sitting down and writing. There's no particular time or place—you suit yourself, your nature. How one works, assuming he's disciplined, doesn't matter.
There is no trick to writing a believable love story, a heartbreaking scene or real-sounding dialogue. All you need is to tell the truth. It’s always heartbreaking.
Thinking is creating with God, as thinking is writing with the ready writer; and worlds are only leaves turned over in the process of composition, about his throne.
It does me good to write a letter which is not a response to a demand, a gratuitous letter, so to speak, which has accumulated in me like the waters of a reservoir.
When one is grateful for something too good for common thanks, writing is less unsatisfactory than speech-one does not, at least, hear how inadequate the words are.
While I was writing Wild Swans I thought the famine was the result of economic mismanagement but during the research I realised that it was something more sinister.
I am gonna write poems til i die and when i have gotten outta this body i am gonna hang round in the wind and knock over everybody who got their feet on the ground.
A lot of people use a smiley face when they write letters. But it's this huge insane compulsion, like "I'm happy! I swear!" I'm not buying it. I don't believe them.
You're writing it is how you feel. And when you're finished you put your signature on it and you mail it off and that's it. And that's how "Stand By Me" was really.
I'm not trying to write a bleak and blistering screed against American civilization. I'm writing something that I hope is fun and satirical and full of possibility.
The last guy tried to get out of me writing him a ticket by saying, 'Kiss me, big boy, kiss me like there's no tomorrow!'...as I recall, I didn't write that ticket.
There wasn't a persona or an attitude that I could reliably write good stuff from.There wasn't a persona or an attitude that I could reliably write good stuff from.
I feel like, as a filmmaker, I'm at my strongest when I write the script and when it comes from me, out of whole cloth. My best work has always been self-generated.
I seem to have a natural tendency to want to share my own observations and feelings with other people, and writing seems to be the way I'm best equipped to do that.
When I write characters, I need to hear their voice. As soon as I get them speaking, and I feel how they use language, I understand who they are and what they want.
[Calvin Trilllin] is not writing about things that I can criticize. I can call these other people out for what I think they are not doing. There's a big difference.
I wrote on my desk wall when I was writing the film...'Art is socialism, but life is capitalism.' That's the hard thing in all of it if you expect to make a living.
I find you write with one person in mind. Usually for me that one person is my wife, because she's my most severe critic and understands best what I'm trying to do.
When I'm writing, I don't put faces on the characters. When I finish the first draft of the script, I start visualizing, and sometimes then I think about one actor.
My grandfather had been a newspaper reporter, as was my uncle. They were pretty good writers and so I thought maybe somewhere down the line I would do some writing.
Writing is a mode of agency in the world that is different from mere employment. There has to be some sort of ethical or moral drive, even if you are unaware of it.