Quotes About Writing

If you try to write a novel in L.A., you're a chump; everyone is speeding by, and you're driving a rickshaw.

Sometimes, reading a blog, which I do infrequently, I see that generations of Americans have been wilfully crippled, and can no longer spell or write a sentence.

But with Interleaf I don't even have a spell program.

Spell check exists for a reason.

I never thought I'd write one book, let alone three. I'm absolutely delighted and every night, thank the good lord for spell check.

I still like complete sentences that are grammatically correct without spelling errors. I don't always achieve this, and it is irksome to read a message I have sent and discover errors. I know I often leave out words in e-mail, not by choice, but because of the way my brain works.

I have horrible handwriting, horrible spelling and horrible grammar.

Mr. Fitzgerald, I believe that is how he spells his name, seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.

Ideas are the easy part. I spend a lot of time batting them away, trying to keep them from distracting me from what I actually have to focus on and finish. A lot of times, they are a siren temptress beckoning me with the promise of a much shorter, simpler, more slender novel over the horizon, but of course that's very dangerous.

What I felt was, if you spend your life just writing fiction, you are going to falsify your material. And the fictional form was going to force you to do things with the material, to dramatize it in a certain way. I thought nonfiction gave one a chance to explore the world, the other world, the world that one didn't know fully.

I spend a lot of time looking at rococo books. And almanacs used to be huge sellers - they were pretty much part of the fabric of life. I thought, this is bizarre, I'd love to buy a book like this, and there isn't one. So I thought, all right then, this could be fun. I'll write an almanac.

I didn't really get serious about my own writing until I was convinced it was something that I wanted to do, that I wanted to spend that much time alone.

I really found this campaign odious. I couldn't get up for it. The quality of the candidates and the campaign, I just found the whole thing second-rate. I didn't know how to explain to my granddaughter that I was spending my dotage writing about Al Gore and George W. Bush.

I love spending time in England, whether it's for writing, producing, or seeing my parents and siblings.

I've spent most of my life writing and developing everything that I've wanted to be in - which is why I started writing in the first place.

I spent most of this afternoon writing a new introduction for my autobiography.

I spent some time in India and thought I might write about Hinduism. But it's so far removed from my experience I couldn't even get my mind around it to write about it.

I write for a certain sphere of readers in the United States who on average watch seven and a half hours of multichannel television per day.

Basically, out of the sphere of what I do - being a comedian/writer, and out of the sphere of football, I am incredibly uncompetitive.

I had several publishers, and they were all the same. They all wanted salacious. And everybody is writing autobiographies, and that's one reason why I'm not going to do it. If young Posh Spice can write her autobiography, then I don't want to write one!

Seth Meyers and I wrote a 'Spider-Man' comic.

At some point along the way, I stopped being a writer, and I became a black writer. I never used to be a black writer. I used to write 'Spider-Man,' 'Green Lantern,' whatever was lying around. 'Thor,' 'Hulk,' whatever. Now, if the phone rings or when the phone rings, it's almost exclusively some project that has something to do with my ethnicity.

And I think I'm an adrenaline junkie, and there's nothing that will spike your adrenaline more than sitting in a theater and listen to an audience react to something you've written.

All my journalism, all my books are first person, and it's all memoir. Even when I'm writing about the oil spill in the Gulf, it's all first person there.