Quotes About Challenge

It's the technique, I think, of writing a novel that is difficult for a nonfiction writer.

The Osage have this lovely phrase: 'Travelers in the Mist.' It was the term for part of an Osage clan that would take the lead whenever the tribe was venturing into unfamiliar realms. And, in a way, we are all travelers in the mist. The challenge is that, as writers, we sometimes want to ignore this murkiness, or we want to write around it.

The average human attention span was 12 seconds in 2000 and 8 seconds in 2013. A drop of 33%. The scary part is that the attention span of a goldfish was 9 seconds, almost 13% more than us humans. That's why it's getting tougher by the day to get people to turn the page. Maybe we writers ought to try writing for goldfish!

Writers spend three years rearranging 26 letters of the alphabet. It's enough to make you lose your mind day by day.

I love improvisation. You can't blame it on the writers. You can't blame it on direction. You can't blame it on the camera guy... It's you. You're on. You've got to do it, and you either sink or swim with what you've got.

The biggest challenge Malayalam cinema faces is territorial. We operate within a small territory in Kerala, and the Malayalam diaspora across the world in comparative terms is quite small. But we have world-class talent in terms of technicians, actors, and writers.

Stand-up is hard. Or to keep it at a certain level is hard: I have no writers but me.

The writers that I aspire to, like Joni Mitchell and Randy Newman, they'll tell you that the work gets harder, not easier. And they set that bar for us where we're always striving to do something better than the last time, whether it's the next song or just the next line.

How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me.

It's the job of intellectuals and writers to cast doubt on perfection.

Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.

The dilemma felt by science fiction writers will be perceived in other creative endeavors.

I love co-writing. That whole process is a challenge in that good writers are pushing you.

Writers transform: they throw a hand grenade into the notion of reality that people carry around in their heads. That's very dangerous, very destructive, but not to do it means you are satisfied with the status quo - and that's a kind of danger as well, because a kind of violence is already being perpetuated.

I thought, because of 'The 100' and 'Apocalypse,' that I knew everything about what life after an apocalypse would be - but Ryan Murphy and the writers of 'American Horror Story' have shown a whole other side of an apocalypse.

I was aware that there is an expectation that writers inevitably falter at this stage, that they fail to live up to the promise of their first successful book, that the next book never pleases the way the prior one did. It simply increased my sense of being challenged.

I don't think that there are very many good writers who don't live without a sense of tension. If they haven't got one immediately available to them, then they usually manage to manufacture it in their private lives.

Recipe writers hate to write about heat. They despise it. Because there aren't proper words for communicating what should be done with it.

I spend days with writers' block. It is a problem.

My problem with new writers is that it takes me five or six years to memorise the right names.

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.

Today, for a Jew who writes in the German language, it is totally impossible to make a living. In no group do I see as much misery, disappointment, desperation and hopelessness as in Jewish writers who write in German.

I'm competitive with anyone who writes a good song - I don't care if it's a band or solo artist or whoever.

I felt a little green, because Shakespeare writes the thought process within the text; it was tricky not to think of what to say and then say it, and instead just deliver the lines.