Quotes About Writing

I've mainly been sampling jazz because the tone of the chords are expressive in itself, so it's quite nice to write over. It's got interpretations of a lot of different genres, too, a lot of dubby-ness and experimental stuff.

If I take a less defensive tone, I'd admit that I couldn't write today a very jazzy, contemporary look at America as I did in 1979 in States of Desire.

As a writer, it's fun to create. And once you get into a long-running show with very established characters and a very established tone and format, after a while it's a really great job, but that's what it is - a job.

Robert Ludlum, all of them, write the absolute best they can. You can't tone it down. You just do what you do, and if it comes out literary, so be it.

There were also some cruel reviews by women, but the tone of the male reviewers, sometimes hysterical, was different. I have suffered, but I don't want to name names-but there have been men who have seemed to want to destroy me or my writing, men I don't even know.

I never plot out my novels in terms of the tone of the book. Hopefully, once a story is begun it reveals itself.

I start with the music before I start writing the movie. It's such an important part for me, emotionally, to set up the tone for the movie.

The way Disney characters move, they're very kind of slow and fluid and flowing; one pose kind of eases into the next. If you look at a show like 'The Simpsons' and subsequently a show like 'Family Guy' - the characters will jerk from pose to pose a lot, a bit more snappy. Which sort of goes along with the writing tone of the show.

I think so much of writing is an instinct, or a feel for a scene, or a feel for a character. You have to put into words the word 'tone,' which I think is thrown around a lot and can mean a hundred different things, but communicating that to other people is definitely a challenge.

I have an amazing team; I have amazing producers; I have amazing writers, but at the end of it, it's me making the decisions on the writing, the tone, the editing.

That's always the most productive research - research into tone, into voice. Facts are nice, too, but facts are more raw material than creative inspiration.

I don't have a constituency, and I'm not autobiographical in any way. I write these deeply moral books in a country which would prefer irony to anything with a moral tone.

'Seize the Story' takes readers all the way through the process of writing fiction, from beginning to end. Every element, from dialogue to setting, plotting to character creation, is laid out and illustrated with examples. But the tone of the book is not that of a dry writing manual - it's definitely written for teenagers.

If a writer is always trying to keep a narrator emitting a tone of complete knowingness, it can become false.

I've been on shows where they're just setting it up, and they're trying to find the tone of the writing and performance. That's always a really chaotic period on shows.

When you're writing on someone else's show, you don't have to think as hard about nailing the perfect tone because you're kind of just like, 'Here's 20 ideas I thought of, and they can just pick the closest.'

No matter what I'm writing, I almost always start with the music. Definitely, the melody seems to set the tone for whatever emotions come to follow, and whatever's going to be written down. It always starts with the music, for me.

One of the things I do well - I think, anyway - is combining different tones.

The best bloggers have tongue planted firmly in cheek.

By the time I got to the hospital, I certainly realised that I had a problem because I couldn't write or print at that time, which lasted luckily only about four months. I'd gone numb here and on my tongue and the right foot a little bit.

I worked on 'Blue Peter' and 'Tonight' and lots of TV plays, filmed people like Rudolf Nureyev and Ted Heath, and ended up a senior cameraman with my own crew. I'd had my first short story published in 1947, and when my writing really started to take off I decided to go freelance, and eventually left the BBC in 1965.

I don't write down my experiences, but I have a very decent memory. I have tons of books in which I write down phrases as they occur to me. That's how I write songs. I'll need a line and I'll go through the books and find it, the right rhyme and everything.

I always write tons of different styles.

When I started writing the screenplay for 'The Queen,' about the aftermath of the death of Princess Diana, both Stephen Frears, the director, and Andy Harries, the producer, begged me not to put Tony Blair in it.