Arts, Media & Entertainment: Writing Quotes

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"I have gone on the air and announced my telephone number at the Washington Post. I go into the night, talking to people, looking for things. The great dreaded thing every reporter lives with is what you don't know. The source you didn't go to. The phone call you didn't return"

Bob Woodward, Journalist

"I don't think there will ever be a permanent truce, but I believe the media needs to be more careful and be willing to count to 10 before rushing on the air or into print"

Bob Woodward, Journalist

"I don't think it's useful for somebody to argue with reviews"

Bob Woodward, Journalist

"I believe there's too little patience and context to many of the investigations I read or see on television"

Bob Woodward, Journalist

"People think that because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they cannot include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that"

Anthony Powell, Novelist

"That's such a thrill - a story I wrote at the beginning of my career, and it's still packin' the house"

Anne McCaffrey, Author

"That's what writing is all about, after all, making others see what you have put down on the page and believing that it does, or could, exist, and you want to go there"

Anne McCaffrey, Author

"I don't often reread my own books, unless I am going into another in the series and need to refresh my mood when originating the concept"

Anne McCaffrey, Author

"Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society"

Octavio Paz, Poet

"The only rule I have found to have any validity in writing is not to bore yourself"

John Mortimer, Novelist

"Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead"

Sinclair Lewis, Novelist

"Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile"

Sinclair Lewis, Novelist

"For me, writing is a love-hate relationship"

Larry Wall, Author

"If you make your living writing, and you can't write anything, it's over. It's very frightening"

Sting, Musician

"When you are writing, of course, you have to do all that writing and correcting for yourself. When I was a librarian, it was expected that I would know about a wide range of books"

Margaret Mahy, Author

"Of course there are big differences in length and character and vocabulary, but each level has its particular pleasures when it comes to the words one can use and the way one uses them"

Margaret Mahy, Author

"I was able to work out all sorts of attitudes to style and event and character, all of which affected the way I came to think about my own writing. I believe that all good writers are original"

Margaret Mahy, Author

"In a way, the characters often do take over"

Margaret Mahy, Author

"Words today are like the shells and rope of seaweed which a child brings home glistening from the beach, and which in an hour have lost their luster"

Cyril Connolly, Journalist

"They are imaginary characters. But perhaps not solely the products of my imagination, since there are some aspects of the characters that relate to my own experience of a wide variety of people"

Margaret Mahy, Author

"The novels take longer to write than the picture book texts, and they do take a different sort of concentration. However, a very short, simple story that works well is just as exciting to me as any longer and more complex book"

Margaret Mahy, Author

"New Zealand is the only country I know well enough to write about. It can sometimes lead to complications"

Margaret Mahy, Author

"I, personally, have found reading a continual support to writing"

Margaret Mahy, Author

"I once knew a house rather like The Land of Smiles - an old house occupied by a varied collection of young people, mainly students. However, none of these people were true models for the characters in the book, though their way of life may have been"

Margaret Mahy, Author

"There are certainly times when my own everyday life seems to retreat so the life of the story can take me over. That is why a writer often needs space and time, so that he or she can abandon ordinary life and "live" with the characters"

Margaret Mahy, Author

"When you are reading, someone has done a lot of work on your behalf, someone has had ideas and has then written and corrected and improved them so that they can be shared"

Margaret Mahy, Author

"Being a librarian certainly helped me with my writing because it made me even more of a reader, and I was always an enthusiastic reader. Writing and reading seem to me to be different aspects of a single imaginative act"

Margaret Mahy, Author

"It can certainly happen that characters in more sophisticated stories can "take over" as they develop and change the author's original ideas. Well, it certainly happens to me at times"

Margaret Mahy, Author

"I think I am too interested in my own ideas to copy anyone else's, but I find that other people's imagery, the flow of language in the outside world, games with words, and ideas about relationships are all most important to me"

Margaret Mahy, Author

"I don't think I prefer writing for one age group above another. I am just as pleased with a story which I feel works well for very small children as I do with a story for young adults"

Margaret Mahy, Author

"The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence"

Cyril Connolly, Journalist

"Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once"

Cyril Connolly, Journalist

"The danger that may really threaten (crime fiction) is that soon there will be more writers than readers"

Jacques Barzun, Educator

"Plot, rules, nor even poetry, are not half so great beauties in tragedy or comedy as a just imitation of nature, of character, of the passions and their operations in diversified situations"

Horace Walpole, Author

"The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works"

Jacques Barzun, Educator

"I have written things that Republicans and Democrats and all kinds of figures have either hated or felt very uncomfortable about. Because in doing these long projects and books, you get close to the bone. And they're not calling me up and asking me for dinner"

Bob Woodward, Journalist

"How well Shakespeare knew how to improve and exalt little circumstances, when he borrowed them from circumstantial or vulgar historians"

Horace Walpole, Author

"Many people have their reputations as reporters and analysts because they are on television, batting around conventional wisdom. A lot of these people have never reported a story"

Bob Woodward, Journalist

"Because of Watergate in part, I am kind of a magnet for calls and information and suggestions"

Bob Woodward, Journalist

"Any suggestion that I'm writing about political operatives because I'm interested in political operatives misses the entire point"

Bob Woodward, Journalist

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