Quotes About Writing

I consider plot a necessary intrusion on what I really want to do, which is write snappy dialogue.

That's something that is almost accidental at the beginning of a career, but the more you write, the more trained you are to recognize the little signals.

For 20 years, Simon & Schuster asked me, 'Why don't you write your autobiography?'

It's not like I wake up every morning and just can't wait to write. It is my job. It's much easier to not write. I'd rather read. This is my income. This is what supports my family. Having a child is a pretty big incentive to keep working.

I didn't know you could write about yourself. Nobody ever told me about this.

The truth is, it's easier for me to write than talk... to express the state I'm in at any time.

I do what I do, and write what I write, without calculating what is worth what and so on. Fortunately, I am not a banker or an accountant. I feel that there is a time when a political statement needs to be made and I make it.

My biggest extravagances are also investments. I have several houses in California, a house in Nashville, an office complex, and I bought the old home place in Tennessee. They are different places for me to write, but I can turn right around and sell them.

To read a book, to think it over, and to write out notes is a useful exercise; a book which will not repay some hard thought is not worth publishing.

I wish I could write music notation. Even if I couldn't play it, I wish I could just write it.

The manual for WordStar, the most popular word-processing program, is 400 pages thick. To write a novel, you have to read a novel - one that reads like a mystery to most people. They're not going to learn slash q-z any more than they're going to learn Morse code. That is what Macintosh is all about.

I want to write so well that a person is 30 or 40 pages in a book of mine... before she realizes she's reading.

I feel a burden if I don't write.

I really don't have anything urgent to say, and I think you shouldn't write unless you have something urgent to say. Sometimes that troubles me, and sometimes I don't really care.

The stuff I'm passionate about is what I write; it isn't multi-million-dollar franchise movies.

I just write what I wanted to write. I write what amuses me. It's totally for myself. I never in my wildest dreams expected this popularity.

If Russians knew how to read, they would write me off.

When I write, I tend to twist my hair. Something for my small mind to do, I guess.

It would not be amiss for the novice to write the last paragraph of his story first, once a synopsis of the plot has been carefully prepared - as it always should be.

Any play is hard to write, and plays are getting harder and harder to get on the stage.

When I write something, I want the best director to direct it. And that's not going to be me. So when David Fincher comes along and wants to direct 'The Social Network,' when Bennett Miller comes along and wants to direct 'Moneyball,' or when Danny Boyle wants to direct 'Jobs'? Hallelujah. I want them directing it.

There are three difficulties in authorship: to write anything worth publishing, to find honest men to publish it, and to find sensible men to read it.

I used to get in trouble a lot in school because I would write very naughty stories and poems in class.

There's no such thing as a perfect person, so it makes no sense to write a perfect person. I don't know any author who'd try. And we write characters, not representations of groups.