Quotes About Writing

My first ever job of doing additional writing for Hans was 'Batman Begins', so that's going back I don't know, are we at 13 years now? I was his assistant for maybe ten years, a long journey.

I've started working on a new album, I'm writing a new book... there are a lot of good things on the horizon.

For me, writing isn't a way of being public or private; it's just a way of being. The process is always full of pain, but I like that. It's a reality, and I just accept it as something not to be avoided.

Making playlists can kill a whole afternoon for me. I like building very specific playlists for new writing projects. In a strange way, choosing certain songs is part of the process of plotting the book out. I pick songs that I think with resonate with characters, their personality quirks, relationship dynamics, action scenes, and so on.

I remember that when I got to NYU, everyone was writing scripts. But I was 18 at the time, and when you write a script, so much of it is about what you pull from life, and this sounds sort of cheesy, but I felt like I didn't have enough life experience at that point to write a movie.

I think I became a writer because I used to write letters to my friends, and I used to love writing them. I loved the idea that you can put marks on a page and send it off, and two days later, someone laughs somewhere else in the world.

The writing I love has something memorable in it - an image, a smell. It's the connection between the moment and the whole concept, weaving the micro together with the macro so that it has a hold on people - that's writing.

Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.

I like to do the research of history and the creativity of writing fiction. I am creating this thing which I think is twice as difficult as writing either history or fiction.

One of the things I had to learn as a writer was to trust the act of writing. To put myself in the position of writing to find out what I was writing.

Through Twitter, I've got a writing career and a directing career, as well as hundreds of other beneficial things that have happened to me. I love it.

I really like to entertain myself in various ways when I'm writing.

For me the writing, when I'm going to direct it myself, is really just the first draft, and I don't change it very much; I only change it on average about two lines per movie.

I had no idea when I moved to Nashville people just were songwriters. I had no idea. So I guess I was selling myself as a singer when I first moved here. But then right after I first moved, I started writing a lot.

When you're writing, in theory, everybody is serving you. When you're directing, you're serving everybody - in the guise of acting like everybody's serving you. But you're really serving the materials. You're serving the actors. You're in charge, but it's not free.

My advice for writers is to get a good day job. It takes the pressure off writing if you have a job that pays the bills.

I've made a career writing about fictitious anti-heroes. To create these worlds, I've spent a lot of time with active members on both sides of the law. And if I had to pick the most interesting of the two, the choice is obvious - we all love the guys in black.

When I'm writing the book I'm laughing at just how overblown the characters seemed. How full of himself he seems. But I didn't get far enough in the series to really drive the joke of it home.

I feel a bigger sense of fulfillment when writing a novel, and short stories are more about instant gratification.

I write in longhand. I am accustomed to that proximity, that feel of writing. Then I sit down and type.

I'm writing a book and working on my one-woman show, Learning To Be Human.

Cooking is the best way to unwind at the end of a long writing day. There's something mindless and hands-on about cooking, which makes it feel like the very opposite of writing, which is heady but inactive.

'Breaking Bad' - when I started watching that show, I thought it was terrific. I love the way it was shot. I love the writing. I love the arc of Bryan Cranston's character. I just thought that was just really, really a wonderful, wonderful show.

Nu shu means women's writing. And it was a secret writing system that was invented by women, used by women and kept a secret by women in one very remote county in China for a thousand years. It's the only language that was invented and used by women to have been found anywhere in the world.