Quotes About Writing

I've been blogging since February of 2001. When I started blogging, it was a dinosaur blog. It was me and a handful of tyrannosaurs. We'd be writing blog entries like, 'The tyrannosaurus is getting grumpy.'

I have a handicap in that English is not my first language. So even though I'm a writer, I don't write anymore because it's just harder in English.

If you can't handle the responsibility of a hit single, don't write one.

When you're 19 and writing plays, you think every actor is full of it. They just can't handle your brilliant material.

I want to be a writer. I do not want to spend 40 hours a week handling e-mails, formatting covers, finding editors, etc.

I am basically analytical, not creative; my writing is simply a creative way of handling analysis.

Writing is incredibly important to me as a way of handling the world, understanding how it works.

Once you start writing something obsessively, it's almost like someone has to rip it from your hands in order for you to put it down.

The writing of 'The Ladykillers' was fun. But once it goes out of your hands it's not fun, 'especially for someone who is used to being hands-on like me.

My handwriting was nothing to write home about, and I had this idea that calligraphy was like taking Latin in high school: that it was one of the bricks, the building bricks, that you had to understand about the forms of writing.

I do have very small handwriting.

After each book, I get panicky. I don't love the reviews. I don't like going through all that, and you would think that, after almost 40 years of writing, I'd have got the hang of it.

Writing has always felt like a compulsion. Even at high school there'd be times when people would ask me if I wanted to go and hang out and I'd sit home and write instead.

I had one of those defining moments in the fourth grade when my teacher said the story I wrote was the best in the class, and therefore I would be going Young Authors Conference where I'd get to hang out with authors all day.

I write, having seen what's happening already in my head. I see it as a movie, and I'm just writing down what's happening in front of me.

Listen, a cable series is a beautiful thing because there's such amazing writing happening on television, and it's a schedule that allows you to do a play or two. There's a reason everybody wants that job!

I think part of the problem sometimes is that there's so much happening in my books, to whittle it down into a single script is hard.

I maintained a diary when I was a child and had all the happenings jotted down.

Well, I must tell you I write the scripts very close to the bone. So I'm writing episode seven now and couldn't tell you what happens in episode eight.

The problem is to find the time to write. That's why I go to sea. I couldn't be happier than when at sea.

I wanted to write something that would be a comedy in the sense of making people feel happier when they finish it than they did when began it.

In 'Happier at Home,' I write a lot about my struggle to create an unhurried atmosphere at home.

One thing that makes me very happy is to have a complicated idea and to feel that I've expressed myself clearly. I remember writing the ending to 'Happier at Home.' I wrote the entire book to build to that ending 'now is now,' and what I had to say was very abstract, and yet I felt satisfied that I managed to say what I wanted to say.

I am the happiest writing and being with the people I love.