Quotes About Writing

There were a couple of Joe imitators in the pile, all men, mostly young, and a trembly, single-spacing woman, probably old, who had written, beneath the title of her 100 percent unpublishable story, "Copyright, Gloria Bismarck. First North American Serial Rights. Approximately 4,213 words." Which was enough to break your heart rather than have contempt for.

Her letters were still bubbled and fat and juvenile, creating a disconnect between the content of what she was writing and the way she wrote it. Who would even take it seriously?

In the past," a writer friend of Ethan's had recently said, over lots of beer, "everyone wanted to be novelists. And now they all want to be screenwriters. It's like screenplays are the same exact thing as novels, but easier to read and worth a lot more money.

Call me Mac," he said. Mackadocious is more like it. "For the next month, I will be your writing instructor..." Lip Macking Good. "It was Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who said, 'Words, like Nature, half reveal and half conceal the Soul within...'" Big Mac Attack. "Here, in the next five weeks, I hope you do more revealing than concealing..." Oh, I'll reveal more than that if you want me to, Mac Daddy.

And besides, I'm not a writer. I don't go to coffeehouses and smoke, wear black, and analyze Sylvia Plath to the point of depression.

Happy entries in my journal do not exist. Or if they do, they end abruptly with scenes and sentences left unfinished because they are too gushy in a way that is disturbing and sick and foreign.

If you were a girl who loved above all to read and write and who could not imagine an adulthood in which these activities did not hold a central place, you probably knew even before puberty that you were headed for conflict.

Meghan's a columnist at the L.A. Times," the friend said. "I'm sure you've read her.

A bench in the street can be a good writer because all kind of material comes onto it like a heavy rain!

Night is a very good and very close friend of a writer!

No writer can be the 'Master of the Words' without loving them! Loving is the way for Mastering! No Love, no Master!

There is no vacation for a writer! Every moment of his life is work!

Thinking is a great joy for a good writer and a great torture for the bad one!

I have always been a huge admirer of my own work. I'm one of the funniest and most entertaining writers I know.

When writing for other comedians, someone once told me, "I want to make it my own." I'd say, "Look, the jokes are written. The relationships are written. First, do it as written. Later you can make it your own." A lot of people don't realize that without a valley, there is no peak. Without information, there is no joke. You've got to set things up.

The perfect life would be to have an amazing part every year and to spend all my free time to just write.

I wonder if he sees the blood of someone who cut themselves while carving out their soul. Or if he's imagining what he'd write if he had a knife in his hand

I can't and won't write without hope. I'd rather never write again.

Does it help?" he asks. "The e-mailing." She nods. "A tiny bit. It's strange. You're writing a letter to someone who's never going to read it, so it kind of frees you up a bit.

We live in a world of increasing alienation, where meeting the right person for life grows harder and harder. Why would we want to spend our free time reading about this grim reality? I have spent many happy months escaping into the writing of my feel-good world of Happy Ever Afters. And what is wrong with that? It makes people feel good. I'm not selling anyone a lie.

My humor tends to be a little more edgy than is appropriate for 'Twilight ' although I got some in there. That was fun! There's just a tonal difference. For me, storytelling is storytelling. But, I do like writing for grown ups.

I've started a company, called Tall Girl Productions, and we've got our first project that is purely producing, not writing, with a writer named Evan Daugherty. It's for NBC, it's called 'Afterthought ' and it's science fiction-ish. That's fun.

I love Charlie, Billy Burke's character. Writing for him is so spectacular, he's so funny and wry and every scene he's in he just takes. There's a scene in 'Eclipse' where Bella tells him she's a virgin, and it's the funniest, most awkward scene I've ever seen on film.

When I was a child I used to read books by Gerald Durrell, who founded Jersey Zoo. He had a job collecting animals for zoos and for a long time that is what I wanted to do. Later when I was a teenager I had a fantastic English teacher called Mrs. Stafford. Her enthusiasm made me decide to be a writer.