Quotes About Writing

I kind of thought the writers were starting to take Taylor and make her kind of down and dirty.

Perhaps, all writers walk such a line. In general - as we all do in our dreams - I believe I put something of myself into all the characters in my novels, male as well as female.

Writers of fiction, when they begin, are more likely to try the short form.

Most writers can write, most rock 'n rollers cannot.

I haven't stuck to any formula. Most great writers stick to the same style, but I wanted to be more various.

Movies have influenced all writers, not just thriller writers.

Writers mean more than they say and say more than they mean.

Special-interest magazines are dangerous places for writers to start out in because the writing quickly falls into a routine and people are likely to find themselves artistically exhausted when they want to work on something of their own.

I think the special thing about Python is that it's a writers' commune. The writers are in charge. The writers decide what the material is.

Sending a handwritten letter is becoming such an anomaly. It's disappearing. My mom is the only one who still writes me letters. And there's something visceral about opening a letter - I see her on the page. I see her in her handwriting.

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

Every author really wants to have letters printed in the papers. Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels.

Genius makes its observations in short-hand; talent writes them out at length.

For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible.

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood.

Talent is a matter of quantity. Talent does not write on page, it writes three hundred.

Obviously, a writer can't know everything about what she writes. It's impossible.

Someone sits at a table or lies on a sofa while staring motionless at a wall or ceiling. Once in a while this person writes down seven lines, only to cross out one of them 15 minutes later, and then another hour passes, during which nothing happens. Who could stand to watch this kind of thing?

I've always considered myself a filmmaker who writes stuff for himself to do.

I don't write the books. God writes the books and delivers the speeches.

One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.

One writes fables in periods of oppression.

It is no great art to say something briefly when, like Tacitus, one has something to say; when one has nothing to say, however, and none the less writes a whole book and makes truth into a liar - that I call an achievement.

Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear, and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses, he will endure or be forgotten.