Quotes About Writing

We try to stay as open-minded about casting as possible. When you're getting things down on paper, you might even avoid writing down a name, let alone if they have blonde hair or this or that, to stop.

I never liked my father. He really was a dullard and misanthrope. My mother and he were married for 22, years and it was an ill match. She encouraged me to be a writer. She opened her home to black friends, and this was the 1950s. She didn't care later when I write about her.

Everyone has their own journey, and for me, going from singing background to writing songs has truly opened doors for me and has also helped me find myself as an artist in terms of what I want to say and the style of music I want to have.

'Fifty Shades' opened the door and made it easier to write about any issue that's controversial. It has helped other authors talk honestly.

Any responsible essayist or memoir writer who's writing about herself is not just saying, 'Here's what happened,' and opening up her diary. There needs to be consideration of other people's feelings.

I think with one exception I've never changed an opening sentence after a book was completed.

People that have known me for a while tell me how they see me grown as an artist and as a writer. I think that this comes with continuing writing each day. I try to write as often as I can and explore more while I do it. I feel more comfortable with opening up and telling more of my story to everyone.

I lived in Boston for three years, and during that time, I wrote my first collection of stories, 'What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us;' other stories that didn't make it into the collection; and several failed novel openings.

I love writing openings, and I think that can give me the key to the movie. So somehow, that can be the easiest part, to be honest.

I've said very openly that the first aspect of my artistry to arrive was writing. It took me a good number of years to find my voice.

When you learn to read and write, it opens up opportunities for you to learn so many other things. When you learn to read, you can then read to learn. And it's the same thing with coding. If you learn to code, you can code to learn. Now some of the things you can learn are sort of obvious. You learn more about how computers work.

The thing is I write to music, so every script I have has its own playlist. Music just opens me up to the emotions that I'm writing. It's just a pretty cool thing.

The difference between me and, say, the opera critic is that I'm charged with thinking about the world beyond opera. I could go see 'Die Fledermaus', for instance. I've never done any of this, by the way. I've never written about one opera since I've had this job.

I'm involved with a baroque opera company here in Italy. I write some of their booklet material, comments on operas. I also write for some baroque opera festivals because this music is my real passion.

I loved writing 'Lost.' It was like a never-ending opera, in a way.

Writing opera off as intrinsically elitist is absurd.

Poetry is all I write, whether for books or readings or for the National Theatre or for the opera house and concert hall or even for TV.

I love to write a book out of questions; in fact, I think it's the only way my writing can operate, if there's something I don't understand.

I'm so deeply interested in what it feels like to be other people that I get to operate under the illusion when I'm writing fiction that I'm not really revealing that much about myself. But, of course, I am, and I know that I am. And yet there's this sort of membrane that I get to work behind as I write my fiction, and I love it.

Before I started writing, I'd never read much fiction. I was more interested in non-fiction. I'm taking the same approach to theatre: I can operate from a position of ignorance and make up my own rules instead of being bound by customs and practice.

I write 200 columns a year, you know. That means I have to have 200 opinions a year. Sometimes, I don't give a damn one way or the other, but that's my job, so I got to take a side.

I don't think it's the writer's job to give answers or to give opinions. In fact, when a writer has answers, I think the work ends up being corrupted. It becomes didactic. What a book does is share a consciousness and invite people to explore the questions as best as you can.

I think that whether we acknowledge it or not, our opinions as authors always influence our work. How can they not?

Miss Prism: Do not speak slightingly of the three-volume novel, Cecily. I wrote one myself in earlier days. Cecily: Did you really, Miss Prism? How wonderfully clever you are! I hope it did not end happily? I don't like novels that end happily. They depress me so much. Miss Prism: The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.