Writing Quotes - Page 216

When I was with the Labor Party, I'd get into trouble because the party bosses determined that some of what I wrote, or proposed to write about, wasn't conducive to their policies or to electoral success.

I think you become a writer when you stop writing for yourself or your teachers and start thinking about readers.

I'm a black American playwright. I couldn't be anything else. I make my art out of black American culture; they're all cut out of the same cloth. That's who I am; that's who I write about.

People associate me with a time when movies were pleasant, when women wore pretty dresses in films and you heard beautiful music. I always love it when people write me and and say 'I was having a rotten time, and I walked into a cinema and saw one of your movies, and it made such a difference.'

Don’t let yourself be. Find something new to try, something to change. Count how often it succeeds and how often it doesn’t. Write about it. Ask a patient or a colleague what they think about it. See if you can keep the conversation going.

I'm giving up acting. . . . I'm 66 and there are a number of celebrations I've got to get down on paper, and acting doesn't allow me to do that. It was a hell of a drug, performance. It's a great thrill, especially for a storyteller. But it can go. Directing can go. Writing can't go. And in terms of what lies ahead, I want to have a burning focus - almost like smoke coming up from the paper as I write.

I would like my book to give people insight to the war before and after, but I don't think anyone could read my book and suddenly make up her mind about the war. I want to write for everybody.

Our country has the oldest tradition of storytelling, and this was much before writing stories even became a norm.

It makes me feel like a brother, or a son that people still care for me... that I have so many fans, who write to me and share with me that I am loved and have been an inspiration. My Dear Fans This I Promise I Will Never Forget. One Love!

We call people who work with mud and earth, and sand and stone, unskilled labor in India. I cannot in this lifetime wield the implements that they use either to dig the earth or to shovel the earth. I can't carry the loads. That's extremely specialized. But they are called unskilled, and I am called skilled because I can write with the pen. I cannot accept this. I find it extremely non-egalitarian to say they are unskilled and I am skilled. It's only a way of looking at it. Knowledge is also like that.

A play is made by sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance-you set free the concealed irony, the deadly joke.

My plays are always involved with society, but I'm writing about people, too, and it's clear over the years that audiences understand them and care about them. The political landscape changes, the issues change, but the people are still there. People don't really change that much.

To write music is to raise a ladder without a wall to lean it against. There is no scaffolding: the building under construction is held in balance only by the miracle of a kind of internal logic, an innate sense of proportion.

If you don't hit a newspaper reader between the eyes with your first sentence, there is no need of writing a second one.

Speech is the representation of the mind, and writing is the representation of speech.

I would like to write a Book which would drive men mad, which would be like an open door leading them where they would never have consented to go, in short, a door that opens onto reality.

If you look at anything long enough, say just that wall in front of you - it will come out of that wall.

Write only of what is important and eternal.

Literature is all, or mostly, about sex.

A man can write one book that can be great, but this doesn't make him a great writer-just the writer of a great book. . . I think a writer has to extend very widely, as well as plunge very deep, to be a great novelist.

All I am is the trick of words writing themselves.

Publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is.

Sometimes I dream a sentence and write it down. It’s usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world.

Here are examples of real women who have done real things: good, bad, and in between. We're expanding not just the definition of the female or feminine hero, but also villains and more complex, nuanced female characters. Too often I hear men say, "I don't know how to write women." Here you go, here are five incredible women you can use to inspire your own stories.

When I began, the guitar was en-closed in a vicious circle. There were no composers writing for the guitar, be-cause there were no virtuoso guitarists.