Arts, Media & Entertainment: Writing Quotes

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"It's easy to write a good column if you've got good information. It's hard if you have to depend on style alone. I suppose there are people who can get away with styling on a regular basis. I'm not one of them. You're probably not, either"

Allan Sloan, Journalist

"Most of my career has been spent with the RSC doing Shakespeare, and the thing you learn from Shakespeare is that his historical plays don't bear anything other than a basic resemblance to history"

Antony Sher, Writer

"I tell writers to keep reading, reading, reading. Read widely and deeply. And I tell them not to give up even after getting rejection letters. And only write what you love"

Anita Diament, Author

"As a journalist I'm comfortable doing library research, and I did a lot! I had a fellowship at Radcliff for a year which gave me access to the Harvard system"

Anita Diament, Author

"I think that Peter Jennings is the only decent one of the big three"

Alexander Payne, Director

"When I think of the Library of Alexandria and of the fact that, although it burnt down, people continue to sort the letters of the alphabet according to that tradition, then that makes certain expressions of modernity, even of interventions on the textual level, possible"

Alexander Kluge, Director

"I find it satisfying and intellectually stimulating to work with the intensity, brevity, balance and word play of the short story"

Annie Proulx, Journalist

"If modesty and candor are necessary to an author in his judgment of his own works, no less are they in his reader"

Sarah Fielding, Writer

"One writes to make a home for oneself, on paper, in time and in others' minds"

Alfred Kazin, Critic

"I grew up wanting to be a writer for theatre"

Christopher Durang, Playwright

"Some very plausible stuff is being written by women in a way that most men are not doing"

Amy Clampitt, Poet

"When I write stories, I am like someone who is in her own country, walking along streets that she has known since she was a child, between walls and trees that are hers"

Natalia Ginzburg, Writer

"As a writer, no one's gonna tell me how to write, I'm gonna write the way I wanna write!"

Jacqueline Susann, Author

"Let's put it this way: if you are a novelist, I think you start out with a 20 word idea, and you work at it and you wind up with a 200,000 word novel. We, picture-book people, or at least I, start out with 200,000 words and I reduce it to 20"

Eric Carle, Author

"I love the idea of a beautiful neighborhood that represents the very best of American values, but also as a fun backdrop to some darker, deliciously sneaky things going on in people's lives"

Marc Cherry, Writer

"Some stage directions you just simply have to throw away"

Judd Hirsch, Actor

"I will say that the prison regime is rather a good one for a writer because you have plenty of time to write"

Mary Archer, Scientist

"Nowadays I construct my books as if they're film scripts"

Leon de Winter, Artist

"The only virtue a character needs to possess between hardcovers, even if he bears a real person's name, is vitality: if he comes to life in our imaginations, he passes the test"

Stephen Vizinczey, Writer

"I wrote my first play when I was eight"

Pam Gems, Playwright

"My only claim to fame, if I have one, is that I'm an editor"

Woody Herman, Musician

"The more interesting the 9-to-5 work is, the more it takes away from my real work, which is writing"

Judith Rossner, Novelist

"It was my angry, Dickensian novel, I suppose. It was cathartic - I expended a lot of frustration on that one"

Richard Helms, Celebrity

"Words are the basic tools if you are a writer. But why? Why do you choose one set of tools rather than another?"

James D. Houston, Writer

"I used to get letters from girl reporters saying that their lives were nowhere near as exciting as Brenda's. I told them that if I made Brenda's life like theirs, nobody would read it"

Dale Messick, Artist

"He can develop sense and style, in the manner of distinguished modern prose, in which event he may be sure that the result will not fall into any objective form"

John C. Ransom, Writer

"Good writers are monotonous, like good composers. They keep trying to perfect the one problem they were born to understand"

Alberto Moravia, Novelist

"Shakespeare was a dramatist of note who lived by writing things to quote"

H. C. Bunner, Journalist

"Why my interest in writers? Well, I'm one, and many of my friends are writers. I know what it's like to write. I'm interested in the creative process. I'm fascinated by the disparity between who we are on the outside, and what we have bubbling away inside us"

Eric Brown, Writer

"I usually don't read things written about me, and I certainly don't read things if they are inappropriate"

Helen Hunt, Actress

"Hard writing makes easy reading"

Wallace Stegner, Novelist

"If I'm not at my study by 10:00, 10:30, forget it, I can't write a word"

Peter O'Toole, Actor

"I work eight hours a day, but I'm not writing all that time. I'm thinking, editing, looking something up. Thinking is what I do a lot of"

Barbara Taylor Bradford, Novelist

"We tend to read each other's books in sizeable chunks as they are written. I don't know that you could say we are ruthless with each other - in fact, I suppose we are very kind. There are ways to make suggestions which are not destructive"

Jonathan Kellerman, Psychologist

"So, the combination of looking at lots of different people and how they react to each other and how they relate to each other and waiting for that inspiration is the thing that allows me to keep writing"

Joan Armatrading, Musician

"I didn't dig it out, it was given to me. They thought it was significant, they gave me the name and I used it"

Bob Novak, Entertainer

"I look for something that is highly unusual, involving ordinary people caught in extraordinary situations"

Walter Lord, Author

"The question is how to bring a work of imagination out of one language that was just as taken-for-granted by the persons who used it as our language is by ourselves. Nothing strange about it"

Robert Fitzgerald, Author

"I think it was lucky that during most of the work on the Odyssey I lived on Homer's sea in houses that were, in one case, shaken by the impact of the Mediterranean winter storms on the rocks below"

Robert Fitzgerald, Author

"The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or to say a new thing in an old way"

Richard Harding Davis, Journalist

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