Arts, Media & Entertainment: Writing Quotes

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"The only thing I can do is type. I learned that when I was 13"

Godfrey Reggio, Director

"Being so honest in my writing is cathartic"

Brian Molko, Musician

"American literature has never been content to be just one among the many literatures of the Western World. It has always aspired to be the literature not only of a new continent but of a New World"

Christopher Dawson, Writer

"Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one"

Salman Rushdie, Novelist

"I tend to be a subscriber to the idea that you have everything you need by the time you're 12 years old to do interesting writing for most of the rest of your life - certainly by the time you're 18"

Bruce Springsteen, Musician

"Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers"

Flannery O'Connor, Author

"It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have"

Flannery O'Connor, Author

"I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one"

Flannery O'Connor, Author

"I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I'm afraid it will not be controversial"

Flannery O'Connor, Author

"I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best"

Flannery O'Connor, Author

"Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher"

Flannery O'Connor, Author

"The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention!"

Flannery O'Connor, Author

"They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves"

Lillian Hellman, Dramatist

"Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped"

Lillian Hellman, Dramatist

"If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves"

Lillian Hellman, Dramatist

"What I do say is that I can write verse, and that the writing of verse in strict form is the best possible training for writing good prose"

Philip Pullman, Writer

"What I couldn't help noticing was that I learned more about the novel in a morning by trying to write a page of one than I'd learned in seven years or so of trying to write criticism"

Philip Pullman, Writer

"My only real claim to anyone's attention lies in my writing"

Philip Pullman, Writer

"If you can't think of what to write, tough luck; write anyway. If you can think of lots more when you've finished the three pages, don't write it; it'll be that much easier to get going next day"

Philip Pullman, Writer

"I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature, culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford, and they'd never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction!"

Philip Pullman, Writer

"For that reason you can't write with music playing, and anyone who says he can is either writing badly, or not listening to the music, or lying. You need to hear what you're writing, and for that you need silence"

Philip Pullman, Writer

"And before I'd got to the end of the first paragraph, I'd come up slap bang against a fundamental problem that still troubles me today whenever I begin a story, and it's this: where am I telling it from?"

Philip Pullman, Writer

"It takes a lot of energy and a lot of neurosis to write a novel. If you were really sensible, you'd do something else"

Lawrence Durrell, Writer

"Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay"

Flannery O'Connor, Author

"I've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it"

Clifford Geertz, Scientist

"I've written a lot of books which are written from the moon - the view from nowhere"

Clifford Geertz, Scientist

"I am traveling less in order to be able to write more. I select my travel destinations according to their degree of usefulness to my work"

Jose Saramago, Writer

"I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist"

Jose Saramago, Writer

"I like myself better when I'm writing regularly"

Willie Nelson, Musician

"I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style"

Louis Aragon, Poet

"Major writing is to say what has been seen, so that it need never be said again"

Delmore Schwartz, Poet

"Write what you like; there is no other rule"

O. Henry, Writer

"If I remember correctly, a writer is someone who wants to convey information. Language or writing is a code?"

Clifford Geertz, Scientist

"I never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I'm satisfied with it"

Clifford Geertz, Scientist

"I don't have the notion that everybody has to write in some single academic style"

Clifford Geertz, Scientist

"In effect, I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn't know how to write essays"

Jose Saramago, Writer

"I don't write drafts. I write from the beginning to the end, and when it's finished, it's done"

Clifford Geertz, Scientist

"Go on thinking that you don't need to be read and you'll find that it may become quite true: no one will feel the need tom read it because it is written for yourself alone; and the public won't feel any impulse to gate crash such a private party"

Dylan Thomas, Poet

"Now you know the rest of the story"

Paul Harvey, Journalist

"I never sit down to write. When I'm moved, I do it. I just wait for it to come. You just hear it. I can't really describe writing. It's in my head"

Lenny Kravitz, Musician

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