Quotes About Writing

This motion-picture muddle had distracted me from my writing.

I researched and wrote 'Muhammad Ali: His Life And Times' for two years.

I had always wanted to be a writer who confused genre boundaries and who was read in multiple contexts.

It's always hard for a writer to make herself into a character; I had to figure out what my defining characteristics were, and that's something I had to work through multiple drafts to figure out.

There's nothing sacred about the book you've written. The Bible says there's safety in a multitude of counselors. The movie is the movie, and the book is the book. They're different critters, and each must stand on their own merits.

The Internet makes writing about restaurants easier and more interesting in quite a few ways, one of the main ones being to do with the mundane business of checking what's on the menu.

As Richard Pryor was to Eddie Murphy, that's what Kurt Vonnegut was to me.

When I started comedy, I was a big Eddie Murphy fan. I thought if you did stand-up, you were supposed to know how to act, write, and host. I thought it was all one thing. That's why it doesn't feel like I'm transitioning to acting: because in my stand-up, I do characters all the time.

I think blogging is a muscle that most people wear out.

By the time I sat down to write 'Family Pictures,' I hadn't written anything in almost two years, and writing, I have discovered, is a muscle: if it isn't exercised, it will atrophy.

Writing is a muscle that needs to be exercised every day: The more you write, the easier it becomes.

Part of being a writer is just getting it in your bones, getting the muscle memory down, just doing it.

Everything is my demon muse. I have a muse which whispers in my ear and says, 'Do this, do that,' but it's my demon who provokes me.

I show up in my writing room at approximately 10 A.M. every morning without fail. Sometimes my muse sees fit to join me there and sometimes she doesn't, but she always knows where I'll be. She doesn't need to go hunting in the taverns or on the beach or drag the boulevard looking for me.

Everything can be grist for the muse. Sometimes, writers draw on personal experiences. 'Ghoul' was just that.

A lot of my writer friends - some of whom are brilliant - work when the Muse calls them, for lack of a better description. You know, days of nothing, then this creative burst where they write for 36 hours straight fueled by caffeine and idealism.

In the TV business, you've got to write fast, and someone will tell you, 'Can you rewrite this episode before... 6 P.M.?' So that's when you rewrite it. You can't wait for the muse to show up.

It was writing about music for NPR - connecting with music fans and experiencing a sense of community - that made me want to write songs again. I began to feel I was in my head too much about music, too analytical.

As a journalist, I have wanted very much to find a way to write about the music industry, and it's been frustrating to me that that's never worked out.

I just kind of transitioned right out of the dance world into the music industry. I started writing and I just fell in love with the whole process.

We decided we didn't want to do a musical for TV because the idea of writing a musical that would be seen on television once seems insane.

They had a contest where they would - for some reason, someone in the past loved musical theater, and so if you wrote a musical, they would fully fund it and put it on the main stage with full costumes and a set and everything, and my roommate said we should totally do that.

Once I write something, I never try to write that same style again, because I get very schizophrenic musically.

Do I want to write a musical? No. I like to do musicals.