Arts, Media & Entertainment: Writing Quotes

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"So, I outlined a horror novel and started writing"

George Stephen, Businessman

"I spent two months on the first draft, working 8 hours a day, five days a week"

George Stephen, Businessman

"My prose is turgid, it just hasn't got any energy"

Carol Ann Duffy, Poet

"The many magazines, ranging from pulp to slick, that used to serve as both farm teams for writers and lures to readers, with hundreds of short stories every month don't exist. Most of the doors for new people have been sealed"

Donald E. Westlake, Writer

"No one I know of has ever had this experience-where you had to sit and wait and wait for a DNA test to come back, just so you can write the last page of the book"

Joseph Wambaugh, Writer

"Actually, every time I am back in New York, I read for as many plays as I can"

Chad Lowe, Actor

"Calvino was not a writer of hits; he was a writer of classics"

William Weaver, Author

"If you like to read, sometimes it's interesting just to go and see what the reality is, of the word, of the seedy or not so seedy fiction writer, the drunk or sober poet... Sometimes you can go looking for illumination"

Harold Brodkey, Author

"I can't change the past, and I don't think I would. I don't expect to be understood. I like what I've written, the stories and two novels. If I had to give up what I've written in order to be clear of this disease, I wouldn't do it"

Harold Brodkey, Author

"Nothing about it interested me. Or about anything else, except making up stories. If literacy weren't so nearly universal, God knows what I'd be. A drain on the State, I shouldn't wonder"

Donald E. Westlake, Writer

"Ambiguity is necessary in some of my stories, not in all. In those, it certainly contributes to the richness of the story. I doubt that thematic closure is never attainable"

Gene Wolfe, Writer

"There's no better satisfaction than writing. I feel that writing is the best and everything else comes with it"

Garry Marshall, Actor

"I always liked spy stories"

Walter Wager, Novelist

"A writer who is in a hurry to be understood today or tomorrow runs the danger of being misunderstood the day after tomorrow"

Johann G. Hamann, Philosopher

"I don't always set stories in villages, more often in towns. But always in smallish communities because the characters' actions are more visible there, and the dramatic tension is heightened"

Joanna Trollope, Novelist

"I realize that I had always, in my heart of hearts, planned to write a biography of Marie Antoinette"

Antonia Fraser, Author

"Once I've got the first draft down on paper, then I do five or six more drafts, the last two of which will be polishing drafts. The ones in between will flesh out the characters, and maybe I'll check my research"

Colleen McCullough, Author

"The greater the conceptual significance of a literary product, the more it should be assumed that it is based on an idea that determines the whole, and that the deeper consciousness of the time to which it belongs is reflected in it"

Ferdinand Christian Baur, Theologian

"Blanche is written with a terrible authority, the authority that comes from artistic necessity when the writer is compelled to write by his demon, rather than by his agent or promoter"

Paul Bailey, Novelist

"I try, and I think I succeed, in making my readers feel sorry for my psychopaths, because I do"

Ruth Rendell, Writer

"I took acting lessons when I was 19, 20 and I had my writing"

Michael Ironside, Actor

"Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep"

Cliff Fadiman, Author

"I think we must quote whenever we feel that the allusion is interesting or helpful or amusing"

Cliff Fadiman, Author

"I've auctioned off many scripts and will continue to do so for good causes"

Claudia Christian, Actress

"I live with the people I create, and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen"

Carson McCullers, Novelist

"I write very slowly"

Carla Bley, Musician

"I believe that nothing comes of nothing, even in Shakespeare. I wanted to know where he got the matter he was working with and what he did with that matter"

Stephen Greenblatt, Critic

"But I never listen to music while I'm writing"

Stephen Greenblatt, Critic

"Words began to appear in English and to make some kind of equivalent. For what satisfaction it is hard to say, except that something seems unusually piercing, living, handsome, in another language, and since English is yours, you wish it to be there too"

Robert Fitzgerald, Author

"The greatest felony in the news business today is to be behind, or to miss a big story. So speed and quantity substitute for thoroughness and quality, for accuracy and context"

Carl Bernstein, Journalist

"You know, that's kind of the thing, I can't freestyle and I used to always wonder why I couldn't, and when I would try once out of every six months, but I was always a great writer!"

Bubba Sparxxx, Musician

"It was such a paradox for me that the only thing I know how to do is act, but that the first thing I abandoned while writing were the characters"

Bryce Dallas Howard, Actress

"I've always written in a free, unencumbered way"

Joan Armatrading, Musician

"The permanent power brokers of this city are the columnists"

Hugh Newell Jacobsen, Architect

"And I liked this extreme character of de Sade"

Philip Kaufman, Director

"Always your work is the same: you have to tell a story, you have to make a character. It doesn't matter if there are thousands of dollars, millions behind it, or if there is nothing"

Elena Anaya, Actress

"For, usually and fitly, the presence of an introduction is held to imply that there is something of consequence and importance to be introduced"

Arthur Machen, Author

"A novel is often a longer process in handling self-doubt"

Robert Sheckley, Author

"So it took me five years, because in the interim I have been doing a lot of personal appearances and movies and some television series that went into the plumbing, and I stopped writing for a while"

Robert Klein, Comedian

"Usually by the time I finish a book tour I've just about had it with the book"

Richard Russo, Novelist

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