Quotes About Writing

I've been getting pulled from newspapers for my entire career.

We crime novelists have a great pulpit. We write about justice and about correcting injustice.

When you write, it's making a certain kind of music in your head. There's a rhythm to it, a pulse, and on the whole, I'm writing to that drum rather than the psychological process.

I tend to write two stories every day, five days a week. It's a real grind. But it also allows me to really try to have my finger on the pulse of injustice in America.

The Ghost Machine album was actually written when I was going through spiritual depression, as that was written right after Motograter and just prior to Five Finger Death Punch.

I like the rhythm of comedy in dramas, if that makes sense. In other words, I don't want to write setup, punch, setup, punch, where the joke dictates the scene; I want to find comedy in which the drama is actually driving the moment in the scene.

I don't write punch lines.

Publishers have published women's fiction into a corner, and now we are all trying to punch our way out of it. We just have to write the best books we possibly can and hope that, once the pink covers and Bridget Jones have faded from memory, we might finally be allowed just to be called writers.

It was hard to write about my dad for the first book because I know how sensitive he is. I knew he wasn't going to take it as well as my mom, who can kind of roll with the punches and is used to having me tell her everything she has done wrong as a parent.

I really respect those guys that get $250,000 for punching up scripts, because it's an art form.

I found a great many pieces of punctuation and typography lying around dormant when I came along - and I must say I had a good time using them.

I don't think music affects what words I choose to type in what order, within what punctuation, at this point, because I'm rereading and editing each sentence, at this point, in my published books, probably 100-150 times each, on average, and listening to probably 20-60 different songs in that time.

Anyone who's taken a lot of creative-writing classes, or taught creative writing, has learned to dread a certain kind of manuscript. It's long, for one thing. It has irritatingly small type; it's grammatically meticulous when it comes to everything but punctuation, for which it has developed its own system of Tolkienic elaboration.

I find getting the first draft down to be the biggest challenge. Every word, every punctuation mark, every plot point is a decision. It's much more fun to play with something that already exists.

Writing a really good screenplay is not easy. It can be a very punishing form.

The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was 'Crime and Punishment'. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days... I said, 'If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.'

I grew up in an environment of jokes and sarcasm and puns. I talk that way, so I write that way.

I'm probably doing puns more than anything in my life.

Funny enough, there have been puppets in everything I've written because I have a huge love of puppets. There's a big puppet musical at the end of 'Sarah Marshall.' I wrote 'The Muppets.'

I didn't want to do 'The Fluffy Puppy Learns to Hold Hands!' or 'Kitty Gets a Box to Play In!' There's a place for that for the little ones - some kids need that stuff. But I'm too dark and sarcastic.

No one wants to read a story where I saw a cute puppy on the street and I petted it. I mean, that's not funny. I only write about the funny stuff.

I don't perceive an audience at all when I write a book. It's pure self-indulgence.

All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain.

I write plays and movies, I live and work at the borderline between word and image just as any cartoonist or illustrator does. I'm not a pure writer. I use words as the score for kinetic imagistic representations.