Quotes About Writing

I am less selfish. But I am more insistent on being part of the creative experience. I find I am a better mother, lover and wife when I am writing. When my daughter was small I wasn't writing as much and I didn't miss it.

I don't really belong to that world and I don't think anyone's going to miss me. I'm much happier just to write myself out of the script entirely.

I missed my father so much when he died that writing about his life and mine was a way of bringing him back to life and getting me to sort of understand more about him and what made him the father, the husband and the man that he was, and how that made me the man, husband and father that I am.

I love writing fiction and can do it anywhere - I once even missed a flight because I was so engrossed.

Well, I really enjoyed drama classes at school, but I left at 16 and started writing a musical with my brother. Because of that I missed out on going to college in general - it was take that chance or not and maybe miss out on something incredible.

I have two little children. I didn't want to be missing their childhood while I was away, busy writing about children.

I can't write; I don't think I'm even particularly good at telling a writer what's good or what's missing. So, actually having someone who can do that is a godsend.

I really feel something's missing if I'm not writing.

I just want to keep writing characters who are interesting and complicated people and interesting roles for women, in TV or film or in theater. I think that's like my 'Blues Brothers' mission.

I wrote 'The Hate U Give' as a short story while I was in college at a mostly white school in conservative Mississippi.

I'm afraid that the act of writing is so scary and anxiety-filled that I never laugh at all. In fact, when people tell me that such and such a scene or story is comical, I tend to gape. I did not intend comedy - ever, as far as I know. It's probably all a mistake. I am essentially a lugubrious writer. Ha ha!

I never know what I'm going to write next, and when I think I do I usually turn out to be mistaken.

When I first started working at MIT, back in the '80s, our writing department had a joint cocktail party with the Harvard writing department. It was kind of oil-and-water.

Pretty much everything I've written is a mix of excitement and fear.

I could not write without my dog, Rhoda, a Lab-chow mix.

I did write more mainstream stuff with DK. But you could always tell the records that I wrote in contrast with everybody else's because the format was a bit different. The harmonies were used in a different type of way. Way more metaphors in the mix.

I've gotten very alert not just to mixed metaphor but to any writing mistake.

Once, my writing-avoidance behavior involved me mixing up a cleaning concoction and getting some ancient stains out of the carpet. My wife liked that one.

You know Seth and Evan, they were lead writers for 'Pineapple Express', and they are great at mixing things up. Taking different genres and mish-mashing them up to create something dynamically new. They'll throw comedy at you, but with a dash of horror and fright that is supposed to make you shocked and scared.

Robert Bloch taught me about mixing horror and humor.

As an actor you get categorized by other people, but it's not like I arrange myself into comedy mode or serious mode. If it's good writing you just have to play it true - if it's funny, it's funny. But obviously you don't want it to be amusing if you're playing Hedda Gabler!

I don't really have special rituals, but I don't try to write fiction unless I have a minimum of a few hours. For me, it takes a while to settle into a mode where I'm truly concentrating.

I haven't really tried to write a movie. It's tough to get into that mode.

The two contemporary writers whom I consider as role models are Janet Malcolm and Michael Lewis.