Arts, Media & Entertainment: Writing Quotes

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"Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary"

Boris Pasternak, Novelist

"I was attracted to science fiction because it was so wide open. I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you were stopped from examining"

Octavia Butler, Writer

"What I'm working on now - I'm back to fantasy, although considering that it's me, I'm turning it into a kind of science fantasy. It's a vampire story - but my vampires are biological vampires. They didn't become vampires because someone bit them; they were born that way"

Octavia Butler, Writer

"Science fiction let me do both. It let me look into science and stick my nose in everywhere"

Octavia Butler, Writer

"I realised I'd never climb Everest but thought I could still write a book"

Sara Paretsky, Author

"No... A novel is a long business. I'm a slow writer, even when I'm doing very well, I write slowly"

Octavia Butler, Writer

"There is an art of reading, as well as an art of thinking, and an art of writing"

Clarence Day, Author

"Journalism is a kind of profession, or craft, or racket, for people who never wanted to grow up and go out into the real world"

Harry Reasoner, Journalist

"Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens"

Jeanette Winterson, Novelist

"The combination of pictures and words together can be really effective, and I began to realise in my career that unless I wrote my own words, then my message was diluted"

Galen Rowell, Photographer

"I'm an efficient, good, professional reporter. But I also write. And so what I try to do is write about places that I know that I care about intensely and write about them in a way that conveys the fact that I care"

Alma Guillermoprieto, Journalist

"The first essence of journalism is to know what you want to know, the second is to find out who will tell you"

John Gunther, Journalist

"Forty years ago, we were on the tail of the Front Page era. There was a different point of view. Reporters and editors were more forgiving of public people. They didn't think they had to stick someone in jail to make a career"

Mike Royko, Writer

"In the literature of France, Moliere occupies the same kind of position as Cervantes in that of Spain, Dante in that of Italy, and Shakespeare in that of England. His glory is more than national - it is universal"

Lytton Strachey, Critic

"All literature consists of whatever the writer thinks is cool. The reader will like the book to the degree that he agrees with the writer about what's cool"

Steven Brust, Author

"Well, one of the things I discovered in the course of looking back and writing about what I saw in my memory is that I was a closely observant person long before I became a reporter"

Alma Guillermoprieto, Journalist

"Science fiction writers put characters into a world with arbitrary rules and work out what happens"

Rudy Rucker, Scientist

"You don't want to write your own opinion, you don't want to just represent yourself, but represent yourself through someone else"

Michael Ondaatje, Author

"The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time, but there is order here, very faint, very human. Meander if you want to get to town"

Michael Ondaatje, Author

"A screenplay is not a finished product; a novel is. A screenplay is a blueprint for something - for a building that will most likely never be built"

Nicholas Meyer, Writer

"What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That's what their substance is"

Jonathan Miller, Entertainer

"My writing is a combination of three elements. The first is travel: not travel like a tourist, but travel as exploration. The second is reading literature on the subject. The third is reflection"

Ryszard Kapuscinski, Journalist

"I grew up in the theatre. It's where I got my start. Writing a television drama with theatrical dialogue about the theatre is beyond perfection"

Aaron Sorkin, Producer

"If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing"

Kingsley Amis, Novelist

"I like the construction of sentences and the juxtaposition of words-not just how they sound or what they mean, but even what they look like"

Don DeLillo, Novelist

"Tone can be as important as text"

Edward Koch, Politician

"There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative"

E. L. Doctorow, Author

"At the height of the McCarthy period, writers were being hounded"

Irwin Shaw, Novelist

"I think it's the people who have no doubt that every word they put down is gold that probably don't write very well"

Dean Koontz, Author

"Don't think it, ink it"

Mark Victor Hansen, Businessman

"I think the rising and falling popularity of areas like hard SF and far-future SF is, to a considerable extent, the same as any other fashion"

Stanley Schmidt, Writer

"Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull"

Rod Serling, Writer

"In America, we have the feeling of the doomed young artist. Fitzgerald was the great example of that"

Irwin Shaw, Novelist

"Ernest Hemingway did a great deal toward making the writer an acceptable public figure; obviously, he was no sissy"

Irwin Shaw, Novelist

"An awful lot of thriller writers write women rather badly. So just doing it OK gets a lot of credit"

Ken Follett, Author

"In that sense, film is superior, but the difficulty is your lack of control as a writer"

Terry Southern, Writer

"I will throw all my best efforts into it: my thoughts and political observations, but ultimately I want to create a narrative that keeps you turning the pages and leaves you with a sense that this thing has a reason for being there"

Frank Miller, Artist

"If you want to study writing, read Dickens. That's how to study writing, or Faulkner, or D.H. Lawrence, or John Keats. They can teach you everything you need to know about writing"

Shelby Foote, Author

"And I'm a slow writer: five, six hundred words is a good day. That's the reason it took me 20 years to write those million and a half words of the Civil War"

Shelby Foote, Author

"I try and write the way things happen. I don't try and fulfill people's wishes"

Harvey Pekar, Writer

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