Quotes About Writing

Jimmy Fallon's strengths are that he's fun, and he's good at impressions, and he's musically inclined. And my strength is that I'm a joke writer, but I also have no filter, and I think that that's not a talent per se, but it's just a thing about myself that I have found that people like about what I do.

I write about what's on my mind. It's like a stress reliever.

Sometimes I'm dealing with so much business, and my mind will be so stressed, that I'll go a week without writing... But the benefit of doing everything yourself is that you get a major payoff.

Writing about Jerusalem was very stressful; every word counts.

Novels are so much unrulier and more stressful to write. A short story can last two pages and then it's over, and that's kind of a relief. I really like balancing the two.

I love writing, and I love postproduction. That's great, because you start to reassemble the film, and you sit there, and you start to really put the film together, finally. The shooting of it is the most stressful part of the process.

I would be an actress for the rest of my life just because it's really relaxing. Writing is hard work, and stand-up is so stressful before you get on stage, but acting is a complete ensemble experience.

To me I don't deal with stress well at all, and it is stressful enough for me to deal with my own one character. So if I had to deal with all the characters and the special effects, and the editing and make the writing tweaks and do everything the director does, that would drive me to an early grave, and I just can't do it.

It's a weird business. You're trying to write something that's built on magic, which is pretty stressful.

Id been thinking about directing for a while. I write a lot, so I have a lot of scripts, and I have wanted to try this. I really enjoyed it, apart from directing myself - you kind of need another set of eyes on you, so that part was a little bit stressful.

I like writing comic pages, discovering the rhythm of the panels, learning how much you can and can't express. It's good to stretch myself as a writer instead of always doing prose work; I write screenplays for the same reason.

I wouldn't say I have comedy chops. I guess you get lucky with good writing because I don't think I'm a comedian by any stretch of the imagination.

Everything starts with what's on the page, what a writer has come up with. And whether it is a big studio film or independent film, is the story being well told? Is it interesting? Is the character interesting? And is there something about the character that may stretch me?

I like to write, but being a busy mother, it is difficult to sit down and write at a stretch.

To me, stretching the capabilities of my imagination is a crucial aspect of writing fiction; you could think of it as a mental form of athleticism.

When a writer is already stretching the bounds of reality by writing within a science fiction or fantasy setting, that writer must realize that excessive coincidence makes the fictional reality the writer is creating less 'real.'

Literary fiction, as a strict genre, is all but dead. Meanwhile, most genres flourish.

If I'm writing strictly for others, how does that show what I'm experiencing or thinking? I just got to a point where I realized I could be as personal as I wanted to be and people could relate to those situations if they so choose.

I'm just trying to write a good story, strictly from imagination. People just think it's random, they don't see the rewriting, phrasing of characters, choosing the words, bringing the world to light in which the characters live in. That creates an illusion that this is real.

My playing music is strictly for fun. When I was in a band, I was really excited to talk about it since I had never really played music to that extent. It was never meant as something I would consider as anything more than having fun with my friends. But I think I would enjoy writing music for the movies that I'm working on.

All my songs usually borrow from my own life but pull from fantasy or other people's stories that you hear, or something you read. It's fun as a writer to pull from all those different places, and to connect them. But also, I don't have an interesting enough life to strictly pull from that.

Your first book is kind of a labor of ignorance. You don't realize the difficulty of it. Your second book is sort of a labor of fear. Then you sort of either hit a stride, or you don't.

They say you hit your stride as a writer at about 50. I'm hoping to do that.

Oh, I collect facts and quotes when I can't write, and I can't write most of the time. I do a little chance operation sometimes where I flip through outdated reference books to see if anything will strike me as beautiful or momentous. Library roulette, I call it.