Quotes About Writing

All writing is discipline, but screenwriting is a drill sergeant.

Exceptional estimable, good, nice, dear people they all were but they all, unluckily, kept asking me about the new novel, and that was excrutiating.

Write in the morning, revise in the afternoon, read at night, and spend the rest of your time exercising your diplomacy, stealth, and charm.

If I had my way books would not be written in English but in an exceedingly difficult secret language.... This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors...who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.

It is woefully hard to find good, or even merely literate, writers, and they laugh at me when I say that sloppy, go-as-you-please writing carries less authority than decent prose. You must remember our public, they say. And indeed that is what I do, and I think the public is fully able to deal with the best they can produce. Patronizing the public, and assuming that it hangs, breathless, upon what it reads in the papers, is almost the worst of journalistic sins.

You remember the little poem by Ibsen that I quoted to you during one of our early meetings? MYSELF: Only vaguely. Something about self-judgement. DR. VON HALLER: No, no; self-judgement comes later. Now pay attention, please: To live is to battle with trolls in the vaults of heart and brain. To write: that is to sit in judgement over one's self.

When you write your first novel you don't really know what you're doing. There may be writers out there who are brilliant, incisive and in control from their first 'Once upon a time'. I'm not one of them. Every once upon a time for me is another experience of white-water rafting in a leaky inner tube. And I have this theory that while the Story Council has its faults, it does have some idea that if books are going to get written, authors have to be able to write them.

I advise those who want to become writers to study veterinary medicine, which is easier. You don't want to be a writer unless you have no choice - and if you have no choice, good luck to you.

A writer who isn't writing isn't really alive.

By writing out your desires and goals on a piece of paper, you send a red flag to your subconscious mind that these thoughts are far more important

Cualquiera que desee mejorar la calidad de su mundo interior y exterior hará bien en agarrar un papel y ponerse a escribir sus objetivos.

James Bond creator Ian Fleming purchased a retreat in Jamaica he named GoldenEye that was perched over a ravishingly lovely beach to provide him with the epiphanies and artistic fuel that would increase his craft. (I find it fascinating that he instructed his gardeners not to walk past the window of his writing studio as it would break his artistic trance.)

Remember, if your life is worth thinking about, it is worth writing about.

Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull.

Coming up with ideas is the easiest thing on earth. Putting them down is the hardest.

If you need drugs to be a good writer, you are not a good writer.

It has forever been thus: So long as men write what they think, then all of the other freedoms - all of them - may remain intact. And it is then that writing becomes a weapon of truth, an article of faith, an act of courage.

I'd made a girl laugh and touch my arm when I'd told her that I was thinking of rewriting it as a musical after the finals. But I couldn't look at her while I spoke. I could look at her, briefly, and say nothing. Or I could make her laugh while I looked over her shoulder or at a wall. I couldn't do both. But I could write.

I know who the real hero is, and it isn't me or brave Lanaya. It's an old man with a white beard and a walking stick and a heart so big it won't let him stop thinking he can change the world by writing down things in a book no one will ever read.

Unfortunately, there is no contemporary history of Rome prior to about 200 BC, when centuries of oral traditions were first committed to writing.

In his magisterial The Reformation, Diarmaid MacCulloch was quite correct that 'Luther's writing of 1543 is a blueprint for the Nazi's Kristallnacht of 1938'

In fact, when the Egyptians would not export papyrus, parchment (made from treated animal skins) was invented in Pergamum. The word parchment derives from the Latin "Pergamena charta," or "paper of Pergamum.

I find that when I am actually writing, I enter a zone of concentration too small to admit my troubles.

1) the Muse visits during, not before, the act of composition, and (2) the writer takes dictation from that place in his mind that knows what he should write next. -from a review by Roger Ebert of film Starting Out In the Evening (2007). http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/p...