Arts, Media & Entertainment: Writing Quotes

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"The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next"

V. S. Naipaul, Novelist

"And if you don't live, you have nothing to write about"

Maynard James Keenan, Musician

"I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension"

Norman Mailer, Novelist

"This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true"

V. S. Naipaul, Novelist

"I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years"

V. S. Naipaul, Novelist

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

V. S. Naipaul, Novelist

"All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there"

V. S. Naipaul, Novelist

"I really like books that you can kind of hear as much as think about, that are so graphic and visual"

Laurie Anderson, Musician

"They lard their lean books with the fat of others' work"

Richard Burton, Actor

"The quality of what is said inevitably influences the way in which it is said, however inexperienced the writer"

Robertson Davies, Novelist

"I do not 'get' ideas; ideas get me"

Robertson Davies, Novelist

"When I read it, I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write"

Norman Mailer, Novelist

"The difference between writing a book and being on television is the difference between conceiving a child and having a baby made in a test tube"

Norman Mailer, Novelist

"I have written a lot about snakes. There's something pretty primordial about it"

Laurie Anderson, Musician

"I have written a few children's books. The first book that I wrote was for children. It was called "The Package", and it was a mystery story in pictures. It had no words"

Laurie Anderson, Musician

"I wish thee as much pleasure in the reading, as I had in the writing"

Francis Quarles, Poet

"Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others"

Marianne Moore, Poet

"A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself"

Marianne Moore, Poet

"If technique is of no interest to a writer, I doubt that the writer is an artist"

Marianne Moore, Poet

"But this is neither here nor there, why do I mention it? Ask my pen, it governs me, I govern not it"

Laurence Sterne, Novelist

"The rise of the dramas in the thirteenth century, and the rise of the great novels in a later period, together with their frank glorification of love and the joys of life, may be called the Third Renaissance"

Hu Shih, Philosopher

"There are plenty of bad editors who try to impose their own vision on a book"

Terri Windling, Artist

"All fantasy should have a solid base in reality"

Max Beerbohm, Actor

"The world gets older, without getting either better or worse, and so does literature. But I do think that the drab current phenomenon that passes for literary studies in the university will finally provide its own corrective"

Harold Bloom, Critic

"I think Freud is about contamination, but I think that is something he learned from Shakespeare, because Shakespeare is about nothing but contamination, you might say"

Harold Bloom, Critic

"But for me, really, the written word is always stronger than film"

Terri Windling, Artist

"When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it"

Philip Roth, Novelist

"What matters in literature, in the end, is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering"

Harold Bloom, Critic

"Two hours of writing fiction leaves this writer completely drained. For those two hours he has been in a different place with totally different people"

Roald Dahl, Novelist

"I have the right to interpretation as a dramatist. I research. It's my responsibility to find the research. It's my responsibility to digest it and do the best that I can with it. But at a certain point that responsibility will become an interpretation"

Oliver Stone, Director

"In comparing various authors with one another, I have discovered that some of the gravest and latest writers have transcribed, word for word, from former works, without making acknowledgment"

Pliny the Elder, Author

"The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you"

Orson Scott Card, Writer

"Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space"

Orson Scott Card, Writer

"While I'm critical to the Bush presidency, it's been enormously beneficial for Salon because we're seen as kind of an aggressive watchdog on the Bush White House. Particularly since Florida, our readership hit a whole new level, and we held onto those readers"

David Talbot, Journalist

"A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom"

Roald Dahl, Novelist

"Shakespeare was the great one before us. His place was between God and despair"

Eugene Ionesco, Dramatist

"When you're kept by a patron, you don't have to duke it out in the media marketplace for dollars and for readers. In some ways, that's a blessing because it takes a lot of pressure off you"

David Talbot, Journalist

"I know that doesn't sound very radical and webby of me to say that but I think the New York Times is important. I also think there's an occasional piece that will pop out"

David Talbot, Journalist

"Yes, but another writer I read in high school who just knocked me out was Theodore Dreiser. I read An American Tragedy all in one weekend and couldn't put it down - I locked myself in my room. Now that was antithetical to every other book I was reading at the time because Dreiser really had no style, but it was powerful"

Joan Didion, Author

"Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up"

Joan Didion, Author

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