Writing Quotes - Page 252

The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.

I grew up with the idealistic notion that writing and literature were noble causes. I had no inkling, no sense of what I would eventually encounter in terms of people who weren't being sincere. I'm not saying that it happens always or a lot, but it happens enough that sometimes it makes me feel a little queasy.

A great novel is worth one thousand films.

Poetry is like fish: if it's fresh, it's good; if it's stale, it's bad; and if you're not certain, try it on the cat.

A writer in someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is.

A lot of college graduates approach me about becoming screenwriters. I tell them, 'Do not become a screenwriter, become a journalist,' because journalists go into worlds that are not their own. Kids who go to Hollywood write coming-of-age stories for their first scripts, about what happened to them when they were sixteen. Then they write the summer camp script. At the age of twenty-three they haven't produced anything, and that's the end of the career.

With every song that I write, I compare it to the Beatles. The thing is, they only got there before me. If I'd been born at the same time as John Lennon, I'd have been up there.

All writers are thieves; theft is a necessary tool of the trade.

There is no such thing as writer's block. There is only not enough information. If you can't write, learn something.

I'm writing for those people in Kenya, but in Irvine and in New York.

Why do you want to become an author? I will accept only one answer. If it is because you feel you can write better than you can do anything else then go ahead and do it without frills and flourishes. Stick to your present job and write in your spare time: but do it as if it is a whole time job.

I feel like writing about a time when I was probably, and think all of us are, the happiest before the obligations start in.

Writers feel like a middleman, standing with pen in hand over the page. A force greater than me stands above telling me what to write. That may sound romantic, but that's how it feels.

The ideas aren't that important. Really they aren't. Everyone's got an idea for a book, a movie, a story, a TV series.

Rule one of reading other people's stories is that whenever you say 'well that's not convincing' the author tells you that's the bit that wasn't made up. This is because real life is under no obligation to be convincing.

The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

There's a mystery to writing, and you don't really know where most of it comes from.

The victory of the show is in the writing. Coming up with sketches and stand-up bits. The rest is just hitting buttons on a machine more or less.

Do-gooders are easily overlooked. We're supposed to be soft, touchy-feely types, who wear Birkenstocks, compost everything, and write poetry by candlelight.

All my writing has been an effort to sort out the paradoxes of my life.

Once— and most of the night definitely counts as once—you can write off as a mistake. But you do this again and he's going to start thinking he has rights over you.” She knew predatory changeling men. They liked control. They particularly liked their women to submit. And Riley was one big giant hunk of testosterone-fueled Neanderthal wolf—he probably thought her submission was his right. She snorted. “Not in this lifetime.

The fullness of our heart is expressed in our eyes, in our touch, in what we write, in what we say, in the way we walk, the way we receive, the way we serve.

I am a little pencil in God's hands. He does the thinking. He does the writing. He does everything and sometimes it is really hard because it is a broken pencil and He has to sharpen it a little more.

Sometimes my humor does offend people, and I've said it before: I don't write jokes to be offensive. I write jokes to be funny, and I guess what I find funny are things that other people sometimes find offensive. I would love nothing more than to never offend anyone, but it just doesn't seem to work out that way.

there is no 'feminine writing' ... and one makes a mistake is using and giving currency to this expression.