Arts, Media & Entertainment: Writing Quotes

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"Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is"

Jose Saramago, Writer

"Part of keeping space open is not to try to choose a form - to spend more time thinking about content, and let form take care of itself"

Holly Near, Musician

"There are writers in Germany who drink the Absolute like water; and there are books in which even the dogs make references to the Infinite"

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, Poet

"Publication is to thinking as childbirth is to the first kiss"

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, Poet

"I think people who create and write, it actually does flow-just flows from into their head, into their hand, and they write it down. It's simple"

Paul McCartney, Musician

"How many authors are there among writers? Author means originator"

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, Poet

"Your source material is the people you know, not those you don't know, but every character is an extension of the author's own personality"

Edward Albee, Dramatist

"I'm not suggesting that the play is without fault; all of my plays are imperfect, I'm rather happy to say-it leaves me something to do"

Edward Albee, Dramatist

"Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite"

Edward Albee, Dramatist

"A play is fiction - and fiction is fact distilled into truth"

Edward Albee, Dramatist

"The news media are, for the most part, the bringers of bad news... and it's not entirely the media's fault, bad news gets higher ratings and sells more papers than good news"

Peter McWilliams, Writer

"A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction"

Graham Greene, Playwright

"Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation"

Graham Greene, Playwright

"The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him"

Jose Ortega Y Gasset, Philosopher

"I knew I would read all kinds of books and try to get at what it is that makes good writers good. But I made no promises that I would write books a lot of people would like to read"

Carl Sandburg, Poet

"I have never quite grasped the worry about the power of the press. After all, it speaks with a thousand voices, in constant dissonance"

Eric Sevareid, Journalist

"The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation"

Elias Canetti, Author

"For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?"

Milan Kundera, Writer

"A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality"

Milan Kundera, Writer

"The light that radiates from the great novels' time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man, and thus the novelist's discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish"

Milan Kundera, Writer

"I am never going to write for the sake of writing"

Emma Lazarus, Poet

"What I write is not for little girls"

Theophile Gautier, Poet

"The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn"

Graham Greene, Playwright

"Thrillers are like life, more like life than you are"

Graham Greene, Playwright

"My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane"

Graham Greene, Playwright

"Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism"

Graham Greene, Playwright

"The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual - when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions - it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance"

Isaac Bashevis Singer, Novelist

"A story to me means a plot where there is some surprise. Because that is how life is - full of surprises"

Isaac Bashevis Singer, Novelist

"The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see - every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties"

Graham Greene, Playwright

"We don't have to think up a title till we get the doggone book written"

Carl Sandburg, Poet

"Originality is not seen in single words or even in sentences. Originality is the sum total of a man's thinking or his writing"

Isaac Bashevis Singer, Novelist

"When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer"

Isaac Bashevis Singer, Novelist

"There are few joys to compare with the telling of a well-told tale"

Charles de Lint, Writer

"Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present"

Edmond De Goncourt, Writer

"When you write down your life, every page should contain something no one has ever heard about"

Elias Canetti, Author

"Write whatever you like!"

Seamus Heaney, Poet

"I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward"

Seamus Heaney, Poet

"Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself - it is the occurring which is difficult"

Stephen Leacock, Economist

"A journalistic purpose could be someone with a Xerox machine in a basement"

Antonin Scalia, Judge

"Writing only leads to more writing"

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette, Novelist

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