Quotes About Writing

There are days when I'll write for 15 minutes and have to give up and move around, and I'll write another paragraph and give up again. On other days I get intensely - focused on the process, sit down at 8 A.M. and won't get up until 8 P.M.

If I could get someone like John Grisham or someone like that to sit down and write a book with me, I'd love that.

Read as much as you can, and then sit down and write.

I must write the book out in my head now, before I sit down.

When I'm with other people who inspire my silliness or sense of humor, I'm funny. When I sit down to write, it's hard not to be funny.

To be able to have the space to sit down and write has always been my central policy.

I've been writing fiction probably since I was about 6 years old, so it's something that is second nature to me now. I just sit down and start writing. I don't sit down and start writing and it comes out perfectly - it's a process.

Acting is playing - it's actually going out on a playground with the other kids and being in the game, and I need that. Writing satisfies that part of myself that longs to sit in my room and dream.

When you're given a newspaper column, you're not being paid to sit on a fence and scratch your chin and say 'On the one hand this' and 'On the other hand that.' You're getting paid for your opinion.

When I'm not acting, I'm writing, building an inventory of scripts. Even if they sit on the shelf, I just keep stacking them up.

Writing humour certainly involves pain. A sitcom is 6 months of writing pain!

I've always felt a bit of an outsider. It used to worry me that, in terms of TV, I did not look like 'the girlfriend' or 'the daughter'. That pushed me to write my own stuff, as I thought no one else was going to write me a lead in the sitcom.

I have tried many times to write a TV sitcom - with little success.

Your average sitcom writer is a very intellectual person.

Sitcom writing is difficult because it's not just about writing jokes - there's a very fine balance between characters, plot, and comedy, that if you get one thing wrong, the whole castle comes falling down.

I can't write a sitcom.

Sitcom characters, my writing partner Sam Bain and I sometimes tell each other, are not normally self-conscious. Or not quite. The best sitcom characters are probably just a little self-conscious. Deep enough to feel pain and humiliation, but shallow enough that there are no hidden depths.

If sitcoms were easy to write, there'd be a lot of good ones, and there aren't.

Writing is the greatest thing about really good sitcoms.

I started trying to be a writer and failed for years. I tried novels, short stories, sitcoms, movies, plays, anything. And then, to support myself, I had millions of jobs on the fringes of show business.

A lot of times people who write sitcoms for the 18 to 49 crowd think writing for kids is easy. It really isn't. First of all, you're very restricted in what you can do.

Some journal writers choose to password-protect their site, which is either an incredibly responsible act or a paranoid one.

When I first started 'Humans of New York,' I was writing short stories. There were about 50 of them. And, you know, they were a great part of the site, but the photography just started growing so fast that I didn't have time to make them anymore.

I started blogging as a hobby, not really thinking anyone would read my site, just my friends.