Arts, Media & Entertainment: Writing Quotes

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"Some newspapers have a hands-off policy on favored politicians. But it's generally very small newspapers or local TV stations"

Bob Woodward, Journalist

"A reporter's ability to keep the bond of confidentiality often enables him to learn the hidden or secret aspects of government"

Bob Woodward, Journalist

"I wouldn't encourage new writers to start off publishing through electronic media... It still isn't wide enough for the readership they would need to get a good start"

Anne McCaffrey, Author

"I have written my own screen version of Pern, but had no buyers yet"

Anne McCaffrey, Author

"Because we build the worlds we wouldn't mind living in. They contain scary things, problems, but also a sense of rightness that makes them alive and makes us want to live there"

Anne McCaffrey, Author

"Writing has been so much a part of my life that I'm really quite annoyed that I can't do as much as I used to"

Anne McCaffrey, Author

"The thing is, emotion - if it's visibly felt by the writer - will go through all the processes it takes to publish a story and still hit the reader right in the gut. But you have to really mean it"

Anne McCaffrey, Author

"I do outlines when I'm writing with someone, but they also need to have a certain amount of freedom"

Anne McCaffrey, Author

"A good story is a good story no matter who wrote it"

Anne McCaffrey, Author

"I think writers need windows on a view to remind them that a whole world is out there, not the minutiae with which they might be dealing on a close scale"

Anne McCaffrey, Author

"I have always used emotion as a writing tool. That goes back to me being on the stage"

Anne McCaffrey, Author

"Occasionally it does hit me, the words on a page. And I still love doing that, as I have for the last 60 years"

Harold Pinter, Playwright

"My second play, The Birthday Party, I wrote in 1958 - or 1957. It was totally destroyed by the critics of the day, who called it an absolute load of rubbish"

Harold Pinter, Playwright

"I don't think there's been any writer like Samuel Beckett. He's unique. He was a most charming man, and I used to send him my plays"

Harold Pinter, Playwright

"A short piece of work means as much to me as a long piece of work"

Harold Pinter, Playwright

"Language is a mixture of statement and evocation"

Elizabeth Bowen, Novelist

"If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea"

Elizabeth Bowen, Novelist

"I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator, I cannot feel that I was, or am"

Elizabeth Bowen, Novelist

"It's one thing you aspire to: someday, you'll be able to write a book"

Thomas Keller, Celebrity

"I feel like the books were just written like a movie. You read it and you can just kind of see everything. Before I went in to read with the director, I read the first book and I loved it. I didn't realize how good the writing was. And then I went in and read with Gary Ross, and that was it"

Liam Hemsworth, Actor

"A great speech is literature"

Peggy Noonan, Writer

"Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions"

Iris Murdoch, Author

"The most original thing a writer can do is write like himself. It is also his most difficult task"

Robertson Davies, Novelist

"Literary critics, however, frequently suffer from a curious belief that every author longs to extend the boundaries of literary art, wants to explore new dimensions of the human spirit, and if he doesn't, he should be ashamed of himself"

Robertson Davies, Novelist

"I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading"

V. S. Naipaul, Novelist

"Never be so brief as to become obscure"

Hosea Ballou, Clergyman

"Writers want to summarize: What does this mean? What did we learn from this? That's a very 19th-century way of thinking about art, because it assumes that it should make our lives better or teach us something"

Laurie Anderson, Musician

"Most important to any fake story is a plausible, realistic edge with a satirical twist that is topical"

Joey Skaggs, Celebrity

"Authors from whom others steal should not complain, but rejoice. Where there is no game there are no poachers"

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Novelist

"The satirist is prevented by repulsion from gaining a better knowledge of the world he is attracted to, yet he is forced by attraction to concern himself with the world that repels him"

Italo Calvino, Journalist

"What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's nose, taking shortcuts"

Italo Calvino, Journalist

"It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear"

Italo Calvino, Journalist

"I do believe that the genre reached its peak before the First World War"

Robyn Davidson, Writer

"Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn't fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will - with luck - come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise"

V. S. Naipaul, Novelist

"But everything of value about me is in my books"

V. S. Naipaul, Novelist

"That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing - which is never an easy thing to do"

V. S. Naipaul, Novelist

"Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck"

Iris Murdoch, Author

"Novels are longer than life"

Natalie Clifford Barney, Author

"Scriptwriting is the toughest part of the whole racket... the least understood and the least noticed"

Frank Capra, Director

"Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it. I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others"

V. S. Naipaul, Novelist

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