Arts, Media & Entertainment: Writing Quotes

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"It's very selfish when I write. I'm not aware, ever, of writing for another person; I'm not even really aware of writing for myself"

Tanith Lee, Writer

"I've been criticised for writing in too complex a manner for younger people"

Tanith Lee, Writer

"Everything I write is designed to be milked to the last drop of revenue"

Leslie Charteris, Writer

"I had never thought of myself as a dramatist, and, for really good technical results, the thought came too late: a man of letters has become too wordy to write economically for the stage"

Laurence Housman, Playwright

"It's hard to get into Newsweek because, as more of our former intellectual magazines take on a pop focus, if there's no buzz, there's no interest"

Branford Marsalis, Musician

"Language cannot describe the scene that followed; the shouts, oaths, frantic gestures, taunts, replies, and little fights; and therefore I shall not attempt it"

Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Lawyer

"I looked, and saw that Bob had entirely lost his left ear, and a large piece from his left cheek. His right eye was a little discoloured, and the blood flowed profusely from his wounds"

Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Lawyer

"I can't imagine a more fulfilling thing for a writer than that you've made a strong impact on the lives of other people. Just because I've heard it before does not mean I don't want to hear it one more time"

Armistead Maupin, Novelist

"Writing is a passion I have never understood, yet a storyteller is all I have ever wanted to be"

Ruth Park, Author

"The world is full of novels in which characters simply say and do. There are certainly legitimate genres in which this is sufficient. But in real and lasting writing the character is:"

Ruth Park, Author

"You have to write badly to write at all. If it's crappy, I will rewrite it later. But it will be mine. You can hear the resonance of an artist who goes into herself"

Kathy Mattea, Musician

"With prose, you can incorporate more details, develop scenes, sustain the tension in a special way. Prose has its own speed"

Robert Morgan, Soldier

"In the later books I am much more at home in the use of language to describe things. I had never thought of that until a critic pointed that out"

Robert Morgan, Soldier

"I tell students they will know they are getting somewhere when a scene is so painful they can just barely bring themselves to write about it. A writer has to draw blood!"

Robert Morgan, Soldier

"I have always distrusted memoir. I tend to write my memoirs through my fiction. It's easier to get to the truth by not claiming that you are speaking it. Some things can be said in fiction that can never be said in memoir"

Armistead Maupin, Novelist

"I don't know if Jim was a major part of that or not. He is one of a small group of real storytellers. He has enormous imagination and ability to write. I'm glad he's coming back. It's going to be good for the show"

Matthew Ashford, Actor

"I don't know anybody in the underworld. I make this stuff up. I don't know any criminals"

James Ellroy, Writer

"All the writers and producers around us that gave us the environment where we could play. They were able to provide us with a place where we could take chances to play with things, go against the grain and do things that people don't always do"

Matthew Ashford, Actor

"Am I worried people will say I'm repeating myself? Sure. One thought I had was to publish it as a novel, but eventually I just decided to do what I wanted to do"

Elizabeth Wurtzel, Writer

"You have to first be a writer and somebody who loves to write. If I couldn't travel, I would still write"

Tim Cahill, Athlete

"Anyway, several rewrites later, Del Rey Books did publish my first novel, and it did become the first work of fiction on the New York Times trade paperback bestseller list"

Terry Brooks, Writer

"I don't want to write formula. I don't want to crank these books out like sausages. Every book is different, which takes a hell of a lot of ingenuity on my part"

Sue Grafton, Novelist

"CNN was one of the first news organizations in the world to train and equip its journalists before deploying them to dangerous areas"

Jim Walton, Businessman

"When I first started writing, I was in advertising at the time, I was doing most of my writing on weekends. I had studied most of the other series heroes and I figured it would be fun for mine to be different and put him in and around water. So I dreamed up Dirk Pitt"

Clive Cussler, Writer

"People aren't used to thinking of cultural forms spreading out across the full range of formal interactions - or what is called the "text" in literary terms"

Tony Conrad, Artist

"Others, amounting to four novels and a mess of short stories which I did not think worth preserving, I have done my best to eliminate from the record by refusing all requests for permission to reprint them, and I hope I have done a good job of making them hard to unearth"

Leslie Charteris, Writer

"A conventional playwright tries to tell you more about the characters than they know about themselves"

Timothy West, Actor

"I don't think, until the end, I had read a positive review of Boy Meets World"

Will Friedle, Actor

"When you write something, it has to hit the level that you accept as being good"

Will Champion, Musician

"There are times when I'm driving home after a day's shooting, thinking to myself, that scene would've been so much better if I had written it out"

Larry David, Actor

"When we've finished the current tour, I'm going to go back to Italy and see if I can do some more writing"

Gerry Mulligan, Musician

"Advertising was fairly simple work, and I really just wanted a job where I could sit and write every day and not get fired for it like I had at other jobs, but it was fun"

John Hughes, Director

"I have a better internal and intuitive understanding of folklore and myth than science and technology, so in that way fantasy is easier"

Sarah Zettel, Author

"I have to do more close research and fact checking for the science fiction. This is not however to say that writing good fantasy does not involve doing good research"

Sarah Zettel, Author

"I did not want to write a story about the invasion of Earth, so I had to create a race capable of living nearby, which meant to either on the Moon, on Mars, or on Venus. I picked Venus"

Sarah Zettel, Author

"Actually, after while, finding the ideas is the easy part. Sorting them through and turning them into stories, now, that's the hard work"

Sarah Zettel, Author

"I'm developing some screenplays at the moment with my Australian producer"

Rachel Griffiths, Actress

"The advice would be the same for any kind of fiction. Keep writing, and keep sending things out, not to friends and relatives, but to people who have the power to buy. A lot of additional, useful tips could be added, but this is fundamental"

Fred Saberhagen, Author

"Writing a children's book means you cannot spin out long narratives or have complex character development"

Norman Macleod, Writer

"So, how to stay inside the world of entertainment without actually getting another job? I felt the only logical answer was to become a novelist. So I wrote the first book - driven by some very real feelings of desperation - and it worked"

Lee Child, Writer

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