Quotes About Writing

With writing, on the other hand, every mark on a page was visible simultaneously. Why constrain writing with a glottographic straitjacket, demanding that it be just as sequential as speech? It would never occur to them. Semasiographic writing naturally took advantage of the page's two-dimensionality; instead of doling out morphemes one at a time, it offered an entire page full of them all at once.

writing was not just a way to record what someone said; it could help you decide what you would say before you said it. And words were not just the pieces of speaking; they were the pieces of thinking. When you wrote them down, you could grasp your thoughts like bricks in your hands and push them into different arrangements.

You could not find the places where words began and ended by listening. The sounds a person made while speaking were as smooth and unbroken as the hide of a goat's leg, but the words were like the bones underneath the meat, and the space between them was the joint where you'd cut if you wanted to separate it into pieces. By leaving spaces when he wrote, Moseby was making visible the bones in what he said.

The four rules of writing... 1. Write to discover. 2. There is no greater discovery than love. 3. All love comes from the Creator. 4. Write what you will.

Live to discover, as long as discovery leads to a love that comes from the Creator... writing was the mirror to life.

The more I wrote, the less I needed to play. Once I got started I couldn't stop. This was my salvation. Writing was a better, healthier, and more enjoyable addiction than gambling, even though gambling was a hell of a lot more lucrative. Playing poker, the gratification isn't delayed. Writing, you sometimes have to wait years for the full punishment.

I have to write in order to keep from playing. It's a simple formula. If I play I lose even if I win. If I write I win even if I lose.

What's writing really about? It's about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.

Imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic.

The most important copy you will ever write is that which you create and print each day on your own subconscious.

Writing a first draft is like groping one's way into a dark room, or overhearing a faint conversation, or telling a joke whose punchline you've forgotten. As someone said, one writes mainly to rewrite, for rewriting and revising are how one's mind comes to inhabit the material fully.

I'd always had this romantic idea, ever since I've been writing scripts, that I would travel one day and pull up stumps, as we say in Australia. It's a cricket reference. You can Google it. Pull up stumps in some country like Italy or Spain and do my little Truman Capote thing.

Pat Moynihan could write books with one hand and legislate with the other. I can't; I have a short attention span. The slightest distraction would take me away from writing.

I came to Hollywood to write and found out I don't have the attention span.

I think I'd prefer to write something more youth-orientated, or something to do with people in their 20s or even 30s. 'EastEnders' spans so many generations that I think I'd find it difficult, but I'd love to have a go.

When I started writing seriously in high school, English was the language I had at my disposal - my Spanish was domestic, colloquial, and not particularly literary or sophisticated.

I've always written about social concerns. My first book was about Spanish Harlem.

My desk is like a 'U,' so I have my computer and lots of dictionaries because I write in Spanish and I live in English.

I speak English and Spanish. I write in Spanish; my books are published in English.

Writing a screenplay is so spare, it kind of reminded me that I really should celebrate what I can do in a book, which is description: for example, places, people, locations.

Every spare second I would write, somehow. On my lunch hour, too.

My sentences tend to be very short and rather spare. I'm more your paragraph kind of gal.

As an author you hope your characters have sparks but truly in the end they have minds of their own!

Action set pieces are my absolute favorite thing to write. I'm pretty much always in the mood to do them, but music certainly helps the process. I usually brainstorm out the dynamics and choreography of a fight to music beforehand - it gives me the little sparks of imagination when I get to the gaps in my own creativity.