Quotes About Writing

Write the story you need to tell and want to read. It's impossible to know what others want, so don't waste time trying to guess.

I remember how I would wait for a play idea. I wasted a tremendous amount of time. I didn't realize that ideas could be made into movies or novels.

How much energy is wasted in Italy in trying to write the novel that obeys all the rules. The energy might have been useful to provide us with more modest, more genuine things, that had less pretensions: short stories, memoirs, notes, testimonials, or at any rate, books that are open, without a preconceived plan.

You can do the best research and be making the strongest intellectual argument, but if readers don't get past the third paragraph you've wasted your energy and valuable ink.

I wasted a lot of years working on my writing and very grandly saying, 'And now... My Novel!,' which would soon be reduced to a short story, then to a paragraph.

No writing effort is ever wasted. At the very least, it's practice, and a writer never knows when he or she might usefully cannibalize an earlier effort for something new.

I think the worst and most insidious procrastination for me is research. I will be looking for some bit of fact or figure to include in the novel, and before I know, I've wasted an entire morning delving into that subject matter without a word written.

No time you spend writing will be wasted - even if you write something that's bad.

Most of my columns at National Review focus on PC culture, and sometimes, when I write about some idiotic, anti-free-speech idea presented by some idiotic, anti-free-speech student or professor, people will ask me why I wasted my time writing about it.

Every day I'm not working or writing is a wasted day to me.

I wasted time writing films. I don't look back on those years as lost, but it wasn't what I should have been doing.

I waste most of the day, then finally start to write around 3 P.M., totally disgusted with myself for my wasteful nature.

I'm tired of wasting letters when punctuation will do, period.

I decided at 40 I was wasting entire chunks of my brain and didn't want to blow my one chance on Earth. I'm glad I made that decision. Writing is largely about time, while visual art is largely about space. Sometimes, as with film, you can hybridize, but I think it's basically the space part of my brain wanting equal footing with the time part.

I feel as if my mission is to write, to see, to observe, and I feel lazy if I'm not reaching conclusions. I feel stupid. I feel as if I'm wasting my time.

I don't see why a book shouldn't be intellectually sound, entertaining, and fun to read. Historians who write academic history, which is unreadable, are basically wasting their time.

I always write these movies that are far too big for any paying customer to sit down and watch from beginning to end, and so I always have this big novel that I have to adapt into a movie as I go.

Post Malone is one of my biggest inspirations. I just love his songs and his writing. He's a genius. Then person-wise, I'm a huge fan of Zendaya. I love her. I watch her interviews and everything she does all the time because I think she's just such a crazy good human being.

We've defined decency down now that we look at the entertainment value of it, whether the acting is good, the writing is good, the story is good, no matter the depravity, we'll watch it.

And that's what the audience was feeling too, as they watched the show and as they watch it now. And overriding all of that is the way it was written. It was written honestly. There was never any manufactured laugh. There was never compromising of character.

I reached a point where I'd watched enough directors do the job that I felt I understood it. And it's not that I'm a slow learner and it took me this long; I also was enjoying writing, and I still enjoy writing - I get tremendous satisfaction out of the writing end of it.

I watched TV religiously when I was a kid, but nowadays - with the Internet - there's so many people writing about TV on the Internet, that everything's sort of under a magnifying glass.

What I do know is that writing is the thing I am best at, and I don't have the stomach, the ability, the strength or the courage to enter the political arena. And I think writing can be a political act, if only to let those people accountable know they are being watched. Literature can be a conscience.

I've rewritten other films and watched my writing be mutilated, but luckily, it's been mutilated anonymously.