Quotes About Writing

I don't care who you are. When you sit down to write the first page of your screenplay, in your head, you're also writing your Oscar acceptance speech.

I have always been fascinated by the human mind, conscious and unconscious - that is what writing and reading is about, too. The why of your life and the why of your choices and the what has happened that you know and the what that you don't know is really riveting, and psychoanalysts share my wonder at how it all unfolds.

For me, it's writing a book and telling people about this story.

I am a writer... I am a genius of a writer; I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name.

I only type every third night. I have no plan. My mind is a blank. I sit down. The typewriter gives me things I don't even know I'm working on. It's a free lunch. A free dinner. I don't know how long it is going to continue, but so far there is nothing easier than writing.

I have all these revelations as I'm writing. Each song is like a chapter of my diary.

The Holocaust is a central event in many people's lives, but it also has become a metaphor for our century. There cannot be an end to speaking and writing about it. Besides, in Israel, everyone carries a biography deep inside him.

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

In an average week I'll be testing recipes, doing a voice-over, filming and writing. I cram everything in Monday to Friday because I refuse to give up the weekend.

If I don't feel like writing on a certain day, I just go to the cafe and hang around.

Writing a memoir begins a process that doesn't necessarily end with publication. You begin to think about family life and stories and relationships, and those are ongoing.

There are some people who come to me for some illumination on their problems. I guess they feel I'm writing about some of the things they themselves are going through. But I don't usually have much help to give - there isn't much you can say to someone in the midst of their own crises.

So when I started writing my own stuff, it was with a lot of combinations and time changes and power.

Writing is a very focused form of meditation. Just as good as sitting in a lotus position.

Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn't fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will - with luck - come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise.

There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.

I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.

Somebody once asked me what my theory of life was, and I said, 'Don't try.' That fits the writing, too. I don't try; I just type.

When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on.

I'm more comfortable writing traditional protagonists. But 'Steve Jobs' and 'The Social Network' have antiheroes. I like to write antiheroes as if they're making their case to God about why they should be allowed into heaven. I have to find something in that character that is like me and write to that.

I can't recommend technical writing as a day job for fiction writers because it's going to be hard to write all day and then come home and write fiction.

If uncovering the truth is the greatest challenge of nonfiction writing, it is also the greatest reward.

I'm looking for backing for an unauthorized auto-biography that I am writing. Hopefully, this will sell in such huge numbers that I will be able to sue myself for an extraordinary amount of money and finance the film version in which I will play everybody.

One of the most challenging aspects of writing a memoir is finding your own voice, and you should be very careful about being influenced by someone else's voice.