Arts, Media & Entertainment: Writing Quotes

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"I would really hate it if I could call up Kafka or Hemingway or Salinger, and any question I could throw at them, they would have an answer. That's the magic when you read or hear something wonderful - there's no one that has all the answers"

Regina Spektor, Musician

"In fiction, you have a rough idea what's coming up next - sometimes you even make a little outline - but in fact you don't know. Each day is a whole new - and for me, a very invigorating - experience"

Peter Matthiessen, Writer

"Nothing is better for a young journalist than to go and write about something that other people don't know about. If you can afford to send yourself to some foreign part, I still think that's by far the best way to break in"

Tina Brown, Editor

"Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life"

Lawrence Kasdan, Producer

"Well, if I am not vulgar, neither is my book. I wrote myself. Suggestiveness is always vulgar. But truth never. My book is not even remotely suggestive. I call things by their names. That is all"

Mary MacLane, Writer

"Every well-written book is a light for me. When you write, you use other writers and their books as guides in the wilderness"

Kate DiCamillo, Author

"People who were more concerned with themselves and looking good to their readers then they were with the characters sacrificed a series for the sake of a story"

Len Wein, Cartoonist

"I get drunk writing words. I don't drink or do drugs, but I get so carried away with writing that I get inebriated from it"

John Shirley, Author

"All books are either dreams or swords, you can cut, or you can drug, with words"

Amy Lowell, Poet

"I never listen to music when I write"

Augusten Burroughs, Writer

"The author O. Henry taught me about the value of the unexpected. He once wrote about the noise of flowers and the smell of birds - the birds were chickens and the flowers, dried sunflowers, rattling against a wall"

Chuck Jones, Director

"Well, I actually do have a country house in Connecticut with a population of 3,000. Like, how small is that? I spend a lot of time there - I write up there. So I kind of have the best of both worlds and I love going up there"

Candace Bushnell, Writer

"There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world"

John Fowles, Writer

"Well, I think everything I've ever read contributes to the background from which I write"

Jack Vance, Author

"A novel is a static thing that one moves through; a play is a dynamic thing that moves past one"

Kenneth Tynan, Critic

"Every writer, to some extent, writes about himself"

Dario Argento, Director

"All of journalism is a shrinking art. So much of it is hype. The O.J. Simpson story is a landmark in the decline of journalism"

Dick Schaap, Journalist

"Well, in the book Carrie was my alter ego. In real life, Sarah Jessica and I don't look anything alike. But people do say that we sound alike. Sarah Jessica is an adorable girl and she is very funny"

Candace Bushnell, Writer

"I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better"

A. J. Liebling, Journalist

"Writing is like carrying a fetus"

Edna O'Brien, Novelist

"If you're setting a game during the Cuban Missile Crisis, look through a library. Find out what people were wearing, what other issues were in the news, how houses were furnished, what cars were being driven. Especially include things which now seem foreign"

Graham Nelson, Mathematician

"Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal"

Francoise Sagan, Playwright

"Although I write screenplays, I don't think I'm a very good writer"

George Lucas, Director

"Not merely can people like me write things that would never have been printed before, but I think an enormously dramatic change has taken place in public opinion, possibly for the wrong reasons"

Anthony Holden, Journalist

"I think writers are prone to hyperbole sometimes"

John Legend, Musician

"I've been to a lot of places and done a lot of things, but writing was always first. It's a kind of pain I can't do without"

Robert Penn Warren, Novelist

"Musicals are written and then rewritten. Those things used to happen on the road. Now they are done in New York during preview performances"

Peter Stone, Writer

"It's hard to know whether certain characters come to life or not, they either come to have their own life or they don't. I've written many things in which the characters just remain inert"

Neil Jordan, Director

"I think we'll always have newspapers, but they'll lose influence"

Will McDonough, Writer

"Through writing, through that process, they realize that they become more intelligent, and more honest and more imaginative than they can be in any other part of their life"

Russell Banks, Author

"All literature is political"

LeVar Burton, Actor

"We never waste space saying, 'On the one hand.' We just state an opinion in a Godlike voice"

Arthur Christiansen, Journalist

"But at the same time, the commonplace statement about them is true: every character is the hero of his own story. Each has a justification for his actions that is convincing to him. It's fun to give these people voices"

Thomas Perry, Musician

"You know, even I have had work or ideas come through me from a source that I honestly cannot identify. And what is that thing? And how are we to relate to it in a way that will not make us lose our minds, but, in fact, might actually keep us sane?"

Elizabeth Gilbert, Novelist

"I can manage a prose format as long as I keep closer to Laurence Sterne than to Henry James"

David Antin, Poet

"At risk of sounding foully pompous, I think that writers' groups are probably very useful at the beginning of a writing career"

Bernard Cornwell, Novelist

"Well, first of all, going off with Dianetics was based upon a thought of mine"

A. E. van Vogt, Author

"It was Noel Coward whose technique I envied and tried to emulate. I collected all his records and writing"

Kenneth Williams, Actor

"Reviewing music or reviewing anything is a writing job. It's nice if you are experienced in the field you are writing about, but writing is what you are doing"

Virgil Thomson, Composer

"I want my prose to be as clear as a pane of glass"

Tracy Kidder, Author

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