Arts, Media & Entertainment: Writing Quotes

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"What good is a writer if he can't destroy literature? And us... what good are we if we don't help as much as we can in that destruction?"

Julio Cortazar, Writer

"What I have in advance are people I want to write about and a problem or problems that I see those people encountering and that I want to explore - it all proceeds sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, and scene by scene"

Chaim Potok, Author

"Oh, I think every author is inspired by all of the books that she reads"

Cornelia Funke, Author

"When you're working with a smaller budget, I suppose one of the things that has to be in your mind when you are writing is that you have to keep the characters down to a minimum"

Atom Egoyan, Director

"When I'm writing for Esquire, my conscious thought is, I'm not writing for American Scholar"

Denis Johnson, Writer

"If you write fiction, you're by yourself. There are certain advantages to that in that you don't have to explain anything to anybody. But when you get in with others who share the loneliness of the whole enterprise, you're not lonely anymore"

Denis Johnson, Writer

"I didn't finish the stories until we went to the Philippines and I got malaria. I couldn't work and I didn't have any money, but I had seven stories. So I wrote three or four more"

Denis Johnson, Writer

"All the modern verse plays, they're terrible; they're mostly about the poetry. It's more important that the play is first"

Denis Johnson, Writer

"The book grew out of the introduction I did for Brady's Gates of Janus. I knew that the writing in that introduction had a better than average chance of being read by people involved in Brady's life - parents of victims, police, Brady himself"

Peter Sotos, Writer

"With all of the qualities of the scene-setting, the dialogue, the place and time and the time and place in which your characters move. And I want to move with the characters, move with them and describe the world in which they are living"

Gay Talese, Journalist

"I've never seen myself as a fantasy writer - ever"

Jonathan Carroll, Author

"In reading plays, however, it should always be remembered that any play, however great, loses much when not seen in action"

George P. Baker, Writer

"Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction"

Donna Tartt, Novelist

"But right now, the situation is that almost all of my writing is out of print"

Peter Sotos, Writer

"There's such good writing now on television and I don't see a lot of great writing on films, sadly"

Scott Speedman, Actor

"Most people won't realize that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else"

Katherine Anne Porter, Journalist

"I spend days with writer's block. It is a problem"

Mackenzie Crook, Actor

"Better that you should take the chance of trying something that is close to your heart, you think is what you want to write, and if they do not publish it, put it in your drawer. But maybe another day will come and you will find a place to put that"

Gay Talese, Journalist

"I grew up in an atmosphere where words were an integral part of culture"

Wole Soyinka, Dramatist

"Anything that I write comes from the soul"

Martin Gore, Musician

"What five books would I like to be remembered for? Well... Tau Zero, I like that one especially. It was somewhat of a tour de force, and I think it got across what I was trying for"

Poul Anderson, Writer

"I've been writing about James Fenimore Cooper. He was not a writer. Here was a man who was 30 years old and had never put anything more than his signature on paper"

Leslie Fiedler, Critic

"I do insist on making what I hope is sense so there's always a coherent narrative or argument that the reader can follow"

Howard Nemerov, Poet

"I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me"

Jonathan Lethem, Writer

"Taking on challenging projects is the way that one grows and extends one's range as a writer, one's technical command, so I consider the time well-spent"

Donna Tartt, Novelist

"Anybody who writes doesn't like to be misunderstood"

Norman MacCaig, Poet

"We journalists tell the public which way the cat is jumping. The public will take care of the cat"

Arthur Hays Sulzberger, Publisher

"I got to write most of everything I said"

R. Lee Ermey, Soldier

"We need to tell our own stories, because when we don't, someone else tells them for us, and they usually get them wrong"

Ava DuVernay, Director

"And that's how I start myself. I usually go back a couple of pages, maybe to the beginning of the chapter, and I start reading. And as I'm reading, I'm tweaking - putting in a different word, changing the syntax, putting that clause over there, you know that sort of thing"

Jean M. Auel, Writer

"Few writers are willing to admit writing is autobiographical"

Terry McMillan, Author

"There might be a different model for a literary community that's quicker, more real-time, and involves more spontaneity"

George Saunders, Writer

"We do not have many intellectuals who can speak out for us internationally. We have no writers who are recognized, respected and loved outside the Arab world"

Tahar Ben Jelloun, Poet

"It's no longer just reporting the headlines of the day, but trying to put the headlines into some context and to add some perspective into what they mean"

Bob Schieffer, Journalist

"I've always loved writing"

Casper Van Dien, Actor

"My use of language is part and parcel of my message"

Theo Van Gogh, Director

"The function of the novelist... is to comment upon life as he sees it"

Frank Norris, Novelist

"This character's entirely invented, and the woman that I interviewed wouldn't recognize herself, or really anything about herself, in this book, which she hasn't read, because she doesn't read English"

Arthur Golden, Writer

"Two years ago I hadn't even thought of the Woman in White, and I was doing a television show and I said I hadn't found a story and the next day somebody rang me and said, "Have you ever thought of the Woman in White""

Andrew Lloyd Webber, Composer

"I do not use the language of my people. I can take liberties with certain themes which the Arabic language would not allow me to take"

Tahar Ben Jelloun, Poet

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