Quotes About Writing

I don't actually do anything special to get in the proper frame of mind for creepy/heinous scenes.

Names and other proper nouns shouldn't distract from the language.

The real impulse of most books is to tell a story to keep the reader lashed to the page. I don't get why that's a proper use of an adult's time.

I like having an idea, or hearing an idea, and getting it into a proper script.

But with 'Newsrevue' I started doing some characters, and I just loved how you were in control. You could write something that day and go and do it that night, rather than waiting for a job that involves other people. So I did character stand-up, and then proper stand-up, and I loved it; I got addicted.

I found, after the experience of making 'Shaun Of The Dead' and then returning to the blank page - because 'Shaun Of The Dead' was the first screenplay I ever wrote properly - the experience of returning to the blank page and having nothing in the drawer was intensely painful.

So I had a ghostwriter, they call them, or somebody who is an experienced writer, to help. I've got the ideas in my head, it's getting them properly on paper.

I did 'Red Riding,' which is TV in the U.K. It became a feature project in North America, but we're in a great era of TV. We all know that, and we hear it all the time, but for filmmakers, it's just a godsend to have your television writing and work to do on television, and the means to do it properly.

In some ways, writing a novel, especially a novel set in the past and about characters who once lived, is about amassing enough details and arranging them properly in order to offer the reader a verisimilitude that satisfies his or her curiosity about the story at hand.

I've experienced being properly lost in my desires, and it's really influenced my writing.

To footnote properly takes time.

I don't want to write an autobiography because I would become public property with no privacy left.

Anytime you're sitting there writing a book about yourself, it's a pretty self-fulfilling prophecy, I guess.

Of course all novelists are egomaniacs and want to draw everyone to their fold just like any other preacher. The snake-oil peddler, the false prophet, all of this is fascinating to me. But I certainly hope that I'm more humane than that.

The difficulty of writing a second novel is directly proportional to how successful the first novel was, it seems.

I was starstruck and completely confused; making a film of this story hadn't even occurred to me, and I hadn't written a single line of the book yet. I had no idea how this man knew anything about my book proposal.

As a television producer, you do a lot of writing - drafting proposals for pilot shows and other things, so yes, a good deal of writing was involved.

Book proposals are written like business plans. You need to identify your market, see what the competition is in the space, calculate how many books you think you can sell, work on building a platform to sell them and promote them.

When I was with the Labor Party, I'd get into trouble because the party bosses determined that some of what I wrote, or proposed to write about, wasn't conducive to their policies or to electoral success.

Longevity, for a columnist, is a simple proposition: Once you start, you don't stop. You do it until you die or can no longer put a sentence together. It has always been my intention to die at my desk, although my most cherished ambition is to outlive the estate tax.

Writing is a black-box proposition. You see actors; you can see what they're doing. You can watch the director on set doing his work. But when a studio says to a writer, 'Give us some pages,' he just goes off and comes back. It's just pages, and suddenly, there's some writing on them.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.

The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.