Quotes About Writing

The spoken word community was significant in making me want to write accessible and urgent poems. Bob Holman, in particular, was an impressive figure.

Because I write a book a year, I always want to do one other project every year that's stimulating in a different way. It means you can be working but not using up your prose juice, you know?

My father didn't want to go to Manhattan for me, and I came to Manhattan and I have done a great job in Manhattan. And then I wrote a best-seller and I wrote numerous best-sellers.

I now rely on a scanner, which reproduces the passages I want to cite, and then I keep my own comments on those books in a separate file so that I will never confuse the two again.

I don't think there was a particular book that made me want to write. They all did. I always wanted to write.

If you have written something that the film people want, like a book, it does give you a way in.

I've always been drawn to the best writing that I can find. I don't care if it's in movies or theater or whatever - if you want to be in front of an audience, you have to do writing you believe in.

If you're not engaged in the writing and it doesn't grab you then you just don't want to do it.

I know that I'm a real writer because sometimes I write a story just because I want to; not because someone's told me to.

As a storyteller, when you're writing a movie and when you're directing, you want to keep people entertained. That's the whole point, right? It has to be entertaining.

When using dialect, use it lightly. A dialect word here and there is enough. All you want to do is suggest. Never let it call attention to itself.

I'm not against anything that anybody might want to try to pull off in fiction. Fiction writing has to, at least, always represent a possibility of absolute freedom.

I considered writing a book too, but I think people don't like to read, to be honest - they want to watch. People want to see crazy things, so we decided to make a film ["Selling Isobel"] instead.

Even the most honest writer lets slip a word too many when he wants to round off a period.

He that writeth in blood and proverbs doth not want to be read, but learnt by heart.

If by that you mean that there is no progress, that even the notion of progress is a delusion, and that history is nothing more than a host of lessons nobody wants to pay attention to, then yes, there is no point. Not in writing it down, not in teaching it.

All right. Let's try something else. I take it you see no point in history.' He grunted. 'If by that you mean that there is no progress, that even the notion of progress is a delusion, and that history is nothing more than a host of lessons nobody wants to pay attention to, then yes, there is no point. Not in writing it down, not in teaching it.

Poets may know hunger,' she commented drily, 'but historians devour. And devouring murders language, makes of it a dead thing.

Interest is never enough. If it doesn't haunt you, you'll never write it well. What haunts and obsesses you may, with luck and labour, interest your readers. What merely interests you is sure to bore them. (from Workbook)

Typefaces are to the written word what different dialects are to different languages.

Organic writers are never directionless because we can always work on scenes that fulfill the promises we've made earlier in the story or go back and foreshadow the fulfillment of promises we think of as the story takes shape.

If you're writing a full-length novel, you don't need to bend over backward trying to be clever in the first line or two. Readers will understand that there's a lot of story to tell, and they'll give you some space to do that. Don't rush the opening.

The truth is, if you like long hours in solitude, emotional turmoil, constant self-criticism, and bouts of heartrending disappointment, you'll make a good writer. And if you can actually tell an engaging story, you might just make a great one.

So part of the secret of hunch cultivation is simple: write everything down.