Arts, Media & Entertainment: Writing Quotes

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"For a writer, published works are like fallen flowers, but the expected new work is like a calyx waiting to blossom"

Cao Yu, Playwright

"If the desire to write is not accompanied by actual writing, then the desire must be not to write"

Hugh Prather, Writer

"News is the first rough draft of history"

Phil Graham, Businessman

"Crime stories are, as you know, one of the most popular forms of entertainment that exist. If you then try to have something to say... that I have, of course"

Stieg Larsson, Author

"He puts his right hand lightly on the cup, I put my left, leaving the right free to transcribe, and away we go. We get, oh, 500 to 600 words an hour. Better than gasoline"

James Merrill, Poet

"I went to college, but I learned to write by reading - and writing"

Daniel Pinkwater, Author

"I write what's given me to write"

Philip Levine, Poet

"I always think change is important in a character. The most dynamic choices that you can make for a character are always the best ones"

Peter Sarsgaard, Actor

"If we're going to live as we are in a world of supply and demand, then journalists had better find a way to create a demand for good journalism"

Bill Kovach, Journalist

"I made a rule for myself that the only television things I would do would be my own stories"

Nigel Kneale, Writer

"At that moment Mr. Clifford, quite unconscious that he and his most personal feelings and aspirations were subjects of discussion, was turning from the main road into the lower road"

Joseph C. Lincoln, Writer

"Orwell is almost our litmus test. Some of his satirical writing looks like reality these days"

John Pilger, Journalist

"I guess you could say I've been writing all my life"

Anthony Doerr, Writer

"A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns"

P. L. Travers, Writer

"The same issue is happening on a show like Everybody Loves Raymond now, which is in its eighth year and struggling to come up with good stories. It'll be interesting to see how they do. The bottom line is, it starts with the writers and ends with the writers"

William Devane, Actor

"All that writers can do is keep trying to say what is deepest in their hearts"

Lloyd Alexander, Writer

"Journalism is, in fact, history on the run"

Thomas Griffith, Editor

"What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order"

P. D. James, Novelist

"I write with a mouse because it has no psychological associations or memories or habits associated with it"

Fred Frith, Composer

"Women writers have been told, forever, that our stories were not valuable. Not as valuable as men's stories about wars, business, power"

Joyce Maynard, Writer

"I think it is probably more important to attend specialized conventions for a journeyman writer than any other, but it's useful at all stages of a career, if for nothing else, to find out how the industry is working at any given time"

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Writer

"No one inspired me to write, but writer Harlan Ellison terrified me into getting published"

Dan Simmons, Author

"Arguments over grammar and style are often as fierce as those over IBM versus Mac, and as fruitless as Coke versus Pepsi and boxers versus briefs"

Jack Lynch, Statesman

"I did not win and in fact I was called into the principal's office for a consultation with my parents. But that was the beginning of my literary career"

William Joyce, Author

"I think I would much rather push the boundaries of the degradation that the characters face"

Dave Rowntree, Musician

"Anyone can write a story based on the kind of horror where you see a guy in car and then there's the bad guy in the back seat. It's infantile to rely on that for telling a story. That's like going to bed and thinking there's a monster under your bed. It's silly"

Sergio Aragones, Cartoonist

"I could give you some names of Workshop participants who are as good as many who are being published, but haven't had the right editor recognize their merit or have not been adequately published"

James Gunn, Writer

"Few speeches which have produced an electrical effect on an audience can bear the colourless photography of a printed record"

Archibald Primrose, Politician

"I was very influenced by The Magic Mountain. It's a book that had a huge impact on me. I loved that as a shape for a novel: put a bunch of people in a beautiful place, give them all tuberculosis, make them all stay in a fur sleeping bag for several years and see what happens"

Ann Patchett, Author

"The transition state of manners and language cannot be too often insisted upon: for this affected the process at both ends, giving the artist in fictitious life an uncertain model to copy and unstable materials to work in"

George Saintsbury, Writer

"I would advise any beginning writer to write the first drafts as if no one else will ever read them - without a thought about publication - and only in the last draft to consider how the work will look from the outside"

Anne Tyler, Novelist

"I always try to be alert to the potential for repetition, for a decaying orbit with regard to my use of technique, etc"

Jeff Vandermeer, Writer

"Writers rush in where publishers fear to tread and where translators fear to tread"

Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Novelist

"If you don't care about science enough to be interested in it on its own, you shouldn't try to write hard science fiction. You can write like Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison as much as you want"

Frederik Pohl, Writer

"I don't think you get to good writing unless you expose yourself and your feelings. Deep songs don't come from the surface; they come from the deep down. The poetry and the songs that you are suppose to write, I believe are in your heart"

Judy Collins, Musician

"Some scientists use TeX or LaTeX, but for most people Word is the thing that writers use these days"

Miguel de Icaza, Scientist

"For me, writing is 75 percent procrastinating and 25 percent actually sitting down and working"

Zooey Deschanel, Actress

"Literature that keeps employing new linguistic and formal modes of expression to draft a panorama of society as a whole while at the same time exposing it, tearing the masks from its face - for me that would be deserving of an award"

Elfriede Jelinek, Playwright

"A newspaper should be the maximum of information, and the minimum of comment"

Richard Cobden, Businessman

"The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer"

Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosopher

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