Arts, Media & Entertainment: Writing Quotes

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"There is no better way of elevating the novel than by making it into a construct which contains ideas"

Heinrich Mann, Novelist

"Shakespeare fascinated me. He hardly ever left the country. His imagination was worldwide, though reading"

Michael Tippett, Composer

"In order to have a plot, you have to have a conflict, something bad has to happen"

Mike Judge, Producer

"I'd like to write a history, maybe of the Reformation"

Jane Haddam, Writer

"A neurotic can perfectly well be a literary genius, but his greatest danger is always that he will not recognize when he is dull"

Louis Auchincloss, Novelist

"The biographer who writes the life of his subject's self-concept passes through a fade into the inner house of life"

Leon Edel, Critic

"I originally had an idea about a family of people who were homeless, just traveling around without any solid roots or any home, who made their way around working wherever they could. I started it with them. The idea of Joe as a protagonist came along a little later"

Larry Brown, Writer

"I would, however, start writing fiction about 10 years before I actually did, because it's such great fun to do, many times more creative than nonfiction"

Judith Krantz, Novelist

"Heaven knows, I've exposed myself in my novels through the use of fantasy and imagination... Now my new book is about what really happened to me... not my heroines"

Judith Krantz, Novelist

"I like contemporary American literature and I like biographies and I like jazz and I like baseball and I like writers who write about the human condition and sci-fi is just something that I happened into"

Jonathan Frakes, Actor

"Levi is one of the best authors I've ever read. It's hard not to have an immediate personal response to his work. He has such a quiet tone"

John Turturro, Actor

"A subject which at first glance seems quite removed from the undeclared concern of the book can encapsulate that concern"

W. G. Sebald, Writer

"I like real stories"

Tim Matheson, Actor

"I really write for people"

John Eaton, Politician

"Every time I write something down I check it to see if it has that telltale glow, the glow that tells me there's something there. If it glows, it stays. Everything is either on or off"

Jim Woodring, Artist

"I don't think I've ever read an old book through from start to finish. Not after more than six months after writing it, that is"

Nicholas Mosley, Novelist

"After these three novels, I gave up writing novels for a time; I was dissatisfied with romantic doom, yet didn't see much way around it"

Nicholas Mosley, Novelist

"I had always said to myself that forty was the cut off point of my apprenticeship which may for some people sound like a very long one, but the novel as art is a middle-aged art"

Jane Rule, Author

"I've mis-signed many a book, Rollins or Clemens. My readers quickly become aware. Booksellers will often promote me under both names, and I do plug both at signings. Generally, the fantasy reader has no problem going into the suspense genre. It's harder for the typical suspense reader to go the other direction"

James Rollins, Author

"It's very rare that publications double their frequency"

James Daly, Actor

"I got to sit down with people who I admired, and have conversations with some of the greatest thinkers and artists and performers. It's a huge privilege for me to be a journalist"

James Daly, Actor

"The news is what it is. It's going to be good, it's going to be positive, it's going to be negative. It's going to have all sorts of effects on candidates always"

Mark E. Hyman, Celebrity

"With two books a year, I don't have time for writer's block"

James Rollins, Author

"Generally, if you preface an interview request with, 'I'm an author writing a book,' for some reason, that seems to open a lot of doors"

James Rollins, Author

"If you can write it, I can be it"

Karen Black, Actress

"I think situations are more important than plot and character"

Harry Mathews, Author

"It is normal for me to wake and find myself writing in the dark... or to be out of my tomb, caught in an unearthly world, alive with the images that haunt me"

Kim Elizabeth, Writer

"The other guy I dug a lot was Burroughs because he was a smart man already; he learned it through the druggie pool - the street scene of an old aristocratic kind of man"

Gregory Corso, Poet

"I'm a fan of short horror fiction... In fact, the most memorable horror I've read is of the short variety... but I have a hard time pulling it off myself"

George Stephen, Businessman

"For the novels I wrote before selling anything, I didn't outline much. I had a vague idea of the story"

George Stephen, Businessman

"The key to this collaboration - which we undertook after much deliberation - was to stretch creatively. New characters, new locales, new form (the novella)"

Jonathan Kellerman, Psychologist

"The characters emerge from my rather twisted mind. That's another enjoyable part of the job: making stuff up"

Jonathan Kellerman, Psychologist

"That has to remain the principal reason for doing it, doesn't it? I know it's possible to write for money, and many very good writers have done so. But for me, it has to remain the principal thing that I actually want to do the writing"

Jonathan Kellerman, Psychologist

"When I was younger, I was obsessed with writing, so even if I wanted to listen, I didn't have time"

Joan Armatrading, Musician

"No, there are no hard and fast rules about sources, no printed booklet to help journalists through"

Ian Hislop, Editor

"I thought Cheever was magnificent and that if I could write like him that would be the best I could do. And then I realized that what I really wanted to write had nothing to do with what he was doing"

Harry Mathews, Author

"Novels for me are how I find out what's going on in my own head. And so that's a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other things as I do"

Cory Doctorow, Journalist

"On the one hand I wonder, was this really my story to tell? On the other hand, I just wanted the story to be told. But the truth is that I didn't think anybody was going to read it"

Kathryn Stockett, Novelist

"The man in gray decided to take the Glen Suite of diamonds at midnight, provided they were still in the apartment safe and the occupants away. This he needed to know. So he watched and he waited. At half past seven he was rewarded"

Frederick Forsyth, Author

"When I decided to take writing seriously, I did a lot of reading and analyzing of the books I liked, and came up with what I thought were pretty sound plotting and structure basics"

George Stephen, Businessman

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