Quotes About Writing

I'm not very good in the mornings and often stay up late writing, so I get up at about 10am if I'm not on set for the day. I take our dog, Milo, for a walk before having a light breakfast and settling down to write.

I work in the mornings almost exclusively.

To combine telling an interesting story with brilliantly written characters is the most difficult thing to do.

Writing is the most important thing in my life - above marriage.

For me, the most important thing is the writing - and certainly the director. But if the writing isn't there, it doesn't matter who the director is!

I would say the secret is to be enthusiastic about everything that comes into your life. To care, to care about people. To be excited about everything that comes close to you. I love to read. And I love to write, mostly.

I'm more of a writer than an actor, and I used to say that I'm mostly an improviser, though I haven't improvised in awhile.

I mostly write on my own, walking, outside.

Writing is fun - at least mostly. I write for four hours every day. After that I go running. As a rule, 10 kilometers (6.2 miles). That's easy to manage.

Honest, I listen to classical mostly. It keeps my mind fresh to write rock songs.

Mostly, I just want to be in my house reading and writing.

Mostly I'm writing about people, so I feel constrained to take with me my view of people, my curiosity about how people choose the things they do and why they come to certain decisions in a certain fashion and all the things that drive most writers.

I think that what I do, in terms of how I craft my words rhetorically, is fairly simple stuff. I don't mean that to denigrate myself. I mean that in the sense of, when I write, the person that I keep in mind is my mother-in-law.

Whenever I write about motherhood - and I write about it a lot - I am drawing on my experiences as a mother and also my experiences as a daughter.

A lot of people who wrote for 'Sex and the City' have gone to write about marriage and motherhood.

If 'Emotions in Motion' comes out right, I can write the book on the formula rock star.

I write a lot more when I'm happy, because you're hopeful, you're motivated.

For writing stand-up, I have to have a little bit of anger and frustration to be motivated to do it. Stand-up, for me, comes from kind of a hostile engine.

I am motivated to write because it is what I am meant to do. It is not a choice - it is what I am. I did not choose writing - it chose me. And I believe it is necessarily that way. Anyone doing this for some other reason should not be.

I feel my writing comes from a desire to... well, it's motivated by many things, but it's inherently a contradiction in that I'm writing for myself, and it's a very interior journey. On the other hand, I feel that writers do make that interior journey out of a desire to connect.

When I get an idea, I start to write like I was electrically motivated.

I used to teach at the Columbia journalism school, and I would tell my students that every book has to have a sentence that motivates it.

It's just that I can write something nice is what motivates me.

There is no motivation higher than being a good writer.