Quotes About Writing

I try and relate my writing to something I know about, and I had a primary experience of being in a competitive, military environment and being part of a squadron.

Some days I'm lucky to squeeze out a page of copy that pleases me, but I get as many as six or seven pages on a very good day; the average is probably three pages.

I actually put Jubilee in 'Squirrel Girl.' I made it a priority.

It's a cliche, but true, that writing is intensely solitary and at times really lonely. I sit in one room and talk to squirrels and blue jays all day.

I don't think you can write novels on the road. You need a certain stability.

I have a lovely office at the back of my house; it's an old stable and you can see right out to the countryside on one side and into the house on the other side.

Furthermore, even if ideas were gettable - say, stacked in a secluded cave like the Dead Sea scrolls - I wouldn't go there. An 'idea,' especially one adhered to from start to finish, can be disastrous for a compelling piece of fiction.

For many years I was engaged in journalism, writing articles and chronicles for the daily press without ever joining the staff of any newspaper.

When I was a staff writer on 'NYPD Blue,' it was truly my job to hear David Milch's voice for that show and to deliver episodes that embodied that voice.

My background is on the stage, so when I'd write movies, they'd be a lot like plays.

For me, writing is a part of directing. It's the first stage of directing.

I jump around in the plotting stage, where I basically just make a bulleted list of every damn thing that happens in the entire book.

When you're making an independent feature, there are so many difficult stages. One, just writing the script is difficult on its own. Then, when you get it to a place where you're happy with it, great - but then you need to find persons who are willing to produce it, who like the script.

In the past, I was free to write in quiet and in the space wherever my desk was at. I could leave my instruments out. In the past, my writing was super private; I never liked showing my work at its earliest stages.

Back in the 1990s, I had an opportunity to make a film. But I realized that it is better for me to go in stages so I could explore myself as an actor and in the process I started writing scripts.

I don't want to write books that are intellectually staggering if nobody's going to read them.

I think the narratives on 'Trans,' 'Plans,' and 'Narrow Stairs' moved away from the way I wrote on the first couple of records, which was a lot more impressionistic. I was writing those songs in my early 20s, so I thought I was being more clear than I actually was.

It's not an easy place to be - to write a horror film. You go down the stairs to the dark to find these characters. It's not a place anyone can go, and sometimes it's not a place that you want to go.

I guess I'm attracted and repelled by isolation. It scares me. And it's why I tend to write about older characters, too, because for them the stakes are somewhat higher.

In plotting a book, my goal is to raise the stakes for the characters and, in so doing, keep the reader mesmerized.

I love action movies, and I love comedy, and I love writing comedy, but the genre of action-comedy - or, at least, as it currently usually is - is just not something that I feel that compelled by, generally, because I find the action to be silly, or it's too slapstick, or the stakes feel low because people are joking in the middle of it.

When I wrote 'High Stakes,' I followed the classical format. I wrote an outline first, then a first draft, then got feedback and rewrote and rewrote it. I'd never done that before.

You can get stale writing with each other for a while.

I think writing is a part-time career, because otherwise you get a little stale, maybe even self-indulgent, when you have to fill the hours with sentences. I don't think, if I wrote 12 hours a day, my work would be much better.