Quotes About Writing

There was a film called 'FM,' and we were asked to do the title song. And I said, 'Does it have to have any specific words?' And they said, 'No, it just has to be about FM radio.' It took a day or two to write.

The idea for 'Conversations with Friends' - two college students who befriend a married couple - struck me at first as a concept for a short story. I started to write it under the title 'Melissa,' and eventually, it got too long.

For years, I sort of would try to write a story that somehow fit the title. And I don't think it happened for maybe another four years that I actually thought of a story, the plot of a story that corresponded to that phrase.

One would think that in writing about literary men and matters there would be no difficulty in finding a title for one's essay, or that any embarrassment which might arise would be from excess of material. I find this, however, far from being the case.

I'm one of those sad cases who've never wanted to be anything but a writer. I started writing my first novel when I was five years old. I have no idea what it was about, but I do remember spending considerable time trying to get the title right, though this had more to do with crayon colour than scansion.

I can tell you that I never begin working on a story until I have a title centered at the top of the first page.

Of course I had written a film about Elizabeth I, and I loved the Tudor period, and I think at the time Working Title and I had debated on whether to do Elizabeth I or Henry VIII. I'd always wanted to do Henry VIII. Like Elizabeth, I'd had this feeling that it had never properly been addressed.

The well-known inspiration for 'Ulysses' is made clear by the title itself: Joyce's novel is based on Homer's 'Odyssey', under the ever-fascinating premise that all of Odysseus' extraordinary adventures can be experienced by a modern man in a single day, provided that the writing consists of his mental activity.

After a while, you become really irritated that you're not recognised as the person who wrote 'The Full Monty.' Everyone goes on about how lovely the characters are. That's because they were written! 'What a clever title.' Yeah, that's because I made up the title!

In my first year or so at the 'Post,' I began to write with some frequency on the least important issues - so-called light editorials. The titles themselves are revealing of just how light: 'On Being a Horse,' 'Brains and Beauty,' 'Mixed Drinks,' 'Lou Gehrig,' and 'Spotted Fever.'

Titles either come to you at the beginning or they don't come to you at all, I find, and I hate the feeling that I haven't got a title because it usually means that you are left at the end scrambling around trying to find something.

I'm terrible with titles.

I think my writing changed when I put 'the' in front of my titles. It had more command.

I suck at titles.

Well, normally we don't think all that hard about titles.

I think now I'm up to something like 85 different titles that I've published.

I've learnt over the years to always be thinking of titles and ideas that I try to put across with just a couple of words. It's the difficult part when you're writing things that are basically abstract.

Definitely, I did not, after 'SNL,' say, 'OK, first I'll go be in Alexander Payne's movie.' I thought I might go back to writing, to be honest.

To be honest, I would never have imagined myself acting on a sitcom that I didn't write.

There's a great joy in writing about a place you know very well, but there's also a lot of responsibility in trying to be accurate. It's a lot like writing about a relative: you can see both their strengths and their shortcomings, and even as you want to be honest, you want people to see the good that's there as well.

You've got to make a decision when you write about your life, and I decided I was going to be honest, and some of those things will be embarrassing.

After college, I was living in New York and wrote furiously, a huge novel that I knew was a failure. I hoped that the book would work, but to be honest, I think I knew it would never work, even as I was finishing it.

To be honest, I have never thought about the intricacies of a script.

Writing and singing does give me some kind of release from the demons of my past, it is a therapy of sorts, but to be honest, my marriage played a more important role in the acceptance of myself than performance has ever done.