Arts, Media & Entertainment: Writing Quotes

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"First of all, there was a volcano of words, an eruption of words that Shakespeare had never used before that had never been used in the English language before. It's astonishing. It pours out of him"

Stephen Greenblatt, Critic

"I have always made an effort to render every detail of my reality with the greatest accuracy, but I have never paid attention to whether my presentation of historical facts was an exact one"

Lion Feuchtwanger, Novelist

"When I start getting close to the end of a novel, something registers in the back of my mind for the next novel, so that I usually don't write or take notes. And I certainly don't begin. I just allow things to percolate for a while"

Richard Russo, Novelist

"A lot of my characters in all of my books have a self-destructive urge. They'll do precisely the thing that they know is wrong, take a perverse delight in doing the wrong thing"

Richard Russo, Novelist

"A character who is thought-out is not born, he or she is contrived. A born character is round, a thought-out character is flat"

Rex Stout, Writer

"I certainly wanted to write a book that was honest about New Orleans without explaining it to death, so much so that the first draft contained references absolutely incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't lived here for several years"

Poppy Z. Brite, Author

"I certainly don't think I would have been asked to pose for Rage if I wasn't a known writer"

Poppy Z. Brite, Author

"He steps on stage and draws the sword of rhetoric, and when he is through, someone is lying wounded and thousands of others are either angry or consoled"

Pete Hamill, Journalist

"I started writing it the day after Sept. 11. I was living in New York City. We didn't have any phone service and we didn't have any mail. Like a lot of writers do, I started to write in a voice that I missed"

Kathryn Stockett, Novelist

"The written word is everything"

John Drinkwater, Poet

"They just have a feel about them. And you feel your way through them and you come out with something that's very powerful and mythic. And you don't quite know how you got there. I think this story has a lot of those elements"

Michael O'Donoghue, Writer

"When I wrote The Onion Field, I realized that my first two novels were just practice"

Joseph Wambaugh, Writer

"You can't be too old to be a writer, but you can definitely be too young!"

Joanna Trollope, Novelist

"Probably 95 percent of the things that are written never get on the screen"

Joseph Wambaugh, Writer

"I very much dislike writing about myself or my work, and when pressed for autobiographical material, can only give a bare chronological outline which contains no pertinent facts"

Shirley Jackson, Novelist

"I type even faster than I talk. I'm very proud of that. I type so fast. And I have to because the characters are living in real time and I've got to keep up with them. It's a miracle they even give me a royalty!"

Rupert Holmes, Composer

"True stories, autobiographical stories, like some novels, begin long ago, before the acts in the account, before the birth of some of the people in the tale"

Harold Brodkey, Author

"And then I met Jerry and he's such a creative fiction writer, and I don't know if there's ever been a team put together the way we are - where one person does the theological way out and suggestions, and the other person goes into the cave and does the fiction writing"

Tim LaHaye, Clergyman

"Sylvester has a great popular sense, as good as any writer I've ever worked with. He knows what audiences want to see, and what they don't want to see"

Ted Kotcheff, Director

"There is an element of autobiography in all fiction in that pain or distress, or pleasure, is based on the author's own. But in my case that is as far as it goes"

William Trevor, Writer

"The capacity you're thinking of is imagination; without it there can be no understanding, indeed no fiction"

William Trevor, Writer

"The way I write is that I'll actually have a conversation out loud with myself. In a weird way, I just kind of get schizophrenic and play two characters"

Zach Braff, Actor

"I always try to make the setting fit the story I have in mind"

Tony Hillerman, Author

"I'm lucky enough to work with, I think, the greatest writer there's ever been, Shakespeare. Whose collected works would always be under my pillow if I was only ever allowed one book to keep, and who never bores me"

Samuel West, Actor

"My books were always full of ink blots, always stained and covered with smeared sketches and pictures, which one draws idly when his attention wanders from his task"

Pierre Loti, Writer

"It is not that Shakespeare's art is in technicolor and fancy, and that real life is black and white and tedious. The life that Shakespeare was living was the only life he had, and he had to use it to create what he was doing"

Stephen Greenblatt, Critic

"First of all, Shakespeare is about pleasure and interest. He was from the first moment he actually wrote something for the stage, and he remains so"

Stephen Greenblatt, Critic

"If something pops in my mind and it's easy, I write it"

Wanda Jackson, Musician

"It doesn't help anybody to put out a bad script"

Victoria Pratt, Actress

"I have things planned for every character, like what they're doing down the road and coming to different realizations, but I don't have how they overlap"

Robert Kirkman, Writer

"What comes easiest for me is dialogue. Sometimes when my characters are speaking to me, I have to slow them down so that I'm not simply taking dictation"

Richard Russo, Novelist

"It's no secret that in my books, I'm trying to make the comic and the serious rub up against each other, just as closely and uncomfortably as I can"

Richard Russo, Novelist

"I think the darker aspect of my fiction-or anybody's fiction-is by its very nature somehow easier to talk about"

Richard Russo, Novelist

"I suppose all writers worry about the well running dry"

Richard Russo, Novelist

"By ignoring a lot of American culture, you can write more interesting stories. Unfortunately, if you were writing about America as it is, you'd be writing about a lot of people sitting in front of television sets"

Richard Russo, Novelist

"The great thing about being a writer is that you are always recreating yourself"

Martin C. Smith, Writer

"It's rare that I actually have a story in my head. I have events or 'what's the next move?' Like, Maggie, 'where's she going to go in this story, where's she going to end up?' Then the story has to fill in the in-between, and that comes as I'm starting it"

Jaime Hernandez, Artist

"My dad told me that no one could ever make it as a writer, that my chances were equivalent to winning the lottery - which was good for me, because I like to have something to prove"

Poppy Z. Brite, Author

"Now my drug is writing or acting, being creative"

Scott Caan, Actor

"If you're writing a novel, you're in a room for three or four years. There's not much coming in from the outside"

Mordecai Richler, Novelist

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