Quotes About Craft

I would love to do more movies. I'd like to get into some theater, too, if I could, just to learn more. I want to do gritty performances that I'm proud of. It doesn't matter to me if four people see it or millions of people see it, as long as I perform in such a way that people go, 'Wow!'

There is a difference between being a wrestler and being a pro wrestler.

To be a true comic, you have to have a signature move. You ever watch wrestling? And your favorite wrestler has the one move that he always does to finish his opponent off, right? Like when he climbs on the rope, and he always jumps off the top rope and finishes off his opponent - that's what a comic has.

Wrestling and kickboxing, like martial arts, combine a handful of skills. They're really an art form.

It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.

Write when drunk. Edit when sober. Marketing is the hangover.

I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.

When I am working on a book or a story, I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you, and it is cool or cold, and you come to your work and warm as you write.

I don't write a synopsis, I don't write a treatment. I write scene by scene.

It's never easy to write a song. It's the most difficult thing I do.

Faulkner is a writer who has had much to do with my soul, but Hemingway is the one who had the most to do with my craft - not simply for his books, but for his astounding knowledge of the aspect of craftsmanship in the science of writing.

Although I write screenplays, I don't think I'm a very good writer.

If technique is of no interest to a writer, I doubt that the writer is an artist.

Some critics will write 'Maya Angelou is a natural writer' - which is right after being a natural heart surgeon.

Social media is a giant distraction to the ultimate aim, which is honing your craft as a songwriter. There are people who are exceptional at it, however, and if you can do both things, then that's fantastic, but if you are a writer, the time is better spent on a clever lyric than a clever tweet.

That process by which you become a writer is a pretty lonely one. We don't have a group apprenticeship like a violinist might training for an orchestra.

Somehow, as a writer, you tend to use words to paper over structural cracks.

If a writer is to tell his own story - tell it slowly, and as if it were a story about other people - if he is to feel the power of the story rise up inside him, if he is to sit down at a table and patiently give himself over to this art - this craft - he must first have been given some hope.

Neal Stephenson handles exposition better than anybody else. I keep trying to learn his tricks, but every time I duck into his pages, I get lost in the stories all over again and forget that I'm a writer.

There is an invisible aspect of being a writer; none of it is about you. It's about your work, and that's what it should be.

I am a writer who happens to use some tools of journalism.

To begin impatiently is the worst mistake a writer can make.

Long before social media existed, the proto-tweets of advertising had penetrated American popular culture: 'A mind is a terrible thing to waste.' 'Where's the beef?' 'A diamond is forever.' 'Think different.' You'd be hard pressed to find a writer's craft that has more directly influenced the vernacular.

Fundamentally, I think of myself as a storyteller, not a writer.