Arts, Media & Entertainment: Writing Quotes

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"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

"It's called a pen. It's like a printer, hooked straight to my brain"

Dale Dauten, Writer

"Hitman does well and it certainly does well enough to survive, but at the same time, I don't want to involve the character into the DC Universe even if it meant more sales, to the point where we sort of upset the balance that we have at the moment"

Garth Ennis, Writer

"When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen. But if you have not a pen, I suppose you must scratch any way you can"

Samuel Lover, Artist

"I found my voice was a reaction to all that voice stuff"

Kathy Acker, Activist

"False eloquence is exaggeration; true eloquence is emphasis"

William R. Alger, Writer

"We do a hard fantasy as well as hard science fiction, and I think I probably single-handedly recreated military science fiction. It was dead before I started working in it"

Jerry Pournelle, Journalist

"Wouldn't want to write the X-Men, and I suppose the X-Men is the ultimate Marvel comic, and I really wouldn't want to go anywhere near it at all, although on the other had, I wouldn't mind having a crack at something like the Punisher"

Garth Ennis, Writer

"Yeah, Hitman, I suppose, is most of the time a lighter read than Preacher; it was always going to be"

Garth Ennis, Writer

"Though my books are written from a historical perspective, I have goon so far back that I am in the realm of prehistorical speculation rather than simple historical fact to weave my stories around"

Jean M. Auel, Writer

"Sometimes the archaism of the language, when it's spoken, is why we are all in love with the Irish today"

Diane Wakoski, Poet

"Going off the road just leaves me more time to be a writer"

Janis Ian, Musician

"I try to help people become the best possible editors of their own work, to help them become conscious of the things they do well, of the things they need to look at again, of the wells of material they have not even begun to dip their buckets into"

Tobias Wolff, Writer

"Each book has been different and has been challenging in its own way to write"

Jean M. Auel, Writer

"The fundamental purpose of a novel like Count Julian is to achieve the unity of object and means of representation, the fusion of treason as scheme and treason as language"

Juan Goytisolo, Poet

"I would rather read a poorly structured story that has fresh ideas than a tightly structured one with cliches"

Douglas Wood, Writer

"In my opinion, the most significant works of the twentieth century are those that rise beyond the conceptual tyranny of genre; they are, at the same time, poetry, criticism, narrative, drama, etc"

Juan Goytisolo, Poet

"I maintain an ongoing survey of Internet Publishing and self publishing, so that it is now possible for any writer with a book to get it published at nominal cost or free, and to have it on sale at booksellers like Amazon.com"

Piers Anthony, Writer

"In Count Julian, I simply proposed to create a text which would allow for diverse levels of reading"

Juan Goytisolo, Poet

"Ellis Peters's historical detail is very accurate and very minute, and therefore is not only interesting to read but good for an actor to acquire a sense of the period. And the other thing I think is that an actor lives in the land of imagination"

Derek Jacobi, Actor

"The thing about imagination is that by the very act of putting it down, there must be some truth in one's own imagination"

Dennis Potter, Dramatist

"The third person narrator, instead of being omniscient, is like a constantly running surveillance tape"

Andrew Vachss, Author

"Shakespeare's idea of the tragic fact is larger than this idea and goes beyond it; but it includes it, and it is worth while to observe the identity of the two in a certain point which is often ignored"

Andrew Coyle Bradley, Judge

"I don't sign contracts for my books"

Andrew Vachss, Author

"Man cannot produce a single work without the assistance of the slow, assiduous, corrosive worm of thought"

Eugenio Montale, Poet

"If you have the material, it will form itself as a kind of connective tissue"

James McBride, Writer

"I need to write to be happy"

Nora Roberts, Author

"Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination"

Janet Frame, Novelist

"Leaks and whispers are a daily routine of news-gathering in Washington"

William Greider, Author

"The dilemma felt by science fiction writers will be perceived in other creative endeavors"

Vernor Vinge, Writer

"So I'll write it, and then I'll find out that I actually wrote something that is utterly useless. You can't use it in the story and it doesn't fit. So I just throw it away. I've done that countless times"

Jack Vance, Author

"First person narrative is a very effective tool, but you have to know as a writer how to make it work"

James McBride, Writer

"I like to have a thing suggested rather than told in full. When every detail is given, the mind rests satisfied, and the imagination loses the desire to use its own wings"

Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Poet

"What I do is put my characters into situations that are so precarious there is no way to get out. And then I figure how to get them out"

Sidney Sheldon, Novelist

"The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile"

Robert Cormier, Author

"Our writers are full of cliches just as old barns are full of bats. There is obviously no rule about this, except that anything that you suspect of being a cliche undoubtedly is one and had better be removed"

Wolcott Gibbs, Writer

"The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper - whether little or great, it belongs to Literature"

Sarah Orne Jewett, Author

"There are a lot of good stories out there, but I haven't found too many great scripts"

Ryan Phillippe, Actor

"Say what you have to say in the fewest possible words"

Arthur Bryant, Historian

"I want the reader to feel something is astonishing. Not the 'what happens,' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me"

Alice Munro, Writer

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