Quotes About Writing

He had written to her just before he sailed for America. The Queen's Pride was his ship, and he loved her. (That was the way his sentences always went: It is raining today and I love you. My cold is better and I love you. Say hello to Horse and I love you. Like that.)

The writing is never what takes the most time. It's trying to figure what you're going to put down that fills the days. With anger at your own ineptitude, with frustration that nothing is happening inside your head, with panic that maybe nothing will ever happen inside your head, with blessed little moments that somehow knit together so that you can begin to visualize a scene.

Screenplays are structure, and that's all they are. The quality of writing—which is crucial in almost every other form of literature—is not what makes a screenplay work. Structure isn't anything else but telling the story, starting as late as possible, starting each scene as late as possible. You don't want to begin with "Once upon a time," because the audience gets antsy.

I write out of revenge

The easiest thing to do on earth is not write.

Jelenka Harvey Harcourt Trade Publishers 15 East 26th Street New York, NY 10010

So I would do the abridgement of the sequel and then do my own novel and ride off into the frigging sunset, thank you very much.

William Goldman

Jelenka Harvey Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 215 Park Avenue South New York, NY 10003*

Chief Justice Hughes once said that he tried to write his opinions clearly and logically, but if he needed the fifth vote of a colleague who insisted on putting in a paragraph that did not "belong," in it went, and he let the law reviews figure out what it meant.

In an article I once wrote on Picnic, I compared a play to a journey, in which every moment should be as interesting as the destination.

A great nation is not saved by wars, it is saved by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans and empty quacks.

And cannot it be added that it was one of the world's misfortunes that so many in the interwar years either ignored or laughed off the Nazi aims which Hitler had taken the pains to put down in writing? Surely the anti-Semitic points of the program promulgated in the Munich beer hall on the evening of February 24, 1920, constituted a dire warning.

The best way to write a novel is to do it behind your own back.

He said, You'll write it not because there's no possibility it'll be found but because it costs too much to not write it.

I certainly didn't mind possibly sending the reader to a dictionary once in a while, but I tried not to do it too often.

The manager of my line told me, You never put anything down except to be read. Every word ever written is written to be read and if some go unread that's only chance, failure, they're like grubs that die without changing.

He said, You'll write it not because there's no possibility it'll be found but because it costs too much to not write it.

The unwritten novel has a basilisk's stare.

The manager of my line told me, You never put anything down except to be read. Every word ever written is written to be read and if some go unread that's only chance, failure, they're like grubs that die without changing.

Writers don't give prescriptions. They give headaches!

The writer is often faced with two choices--turn away from the reality of life's intimidating complexity or conquer its mystery by battling with it. The writer who chooses the former soon runs out of energy and produces elegantly tired fiction.

If I write novels in a country in which most citizens are illiterate, who then is my community?

Most writers who are beginners, if they are honest with themselves, will admit that they are praying for a readership as they begin to write. But it should be the quality of the craft, not the audience, that should be the greatest motivating factor.