Arts, Media & Entertainment: Writing Quotes

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"To write for PC reasons, because you think you ought to be dealing with this subject, is never going to yield anything that is really going to matter to anyone else. It has to matter to you"

Rita Dove, Poet

"Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us"

Paul Theroux, Novelist

"An emotion is suggested and demolished in one glance by certain words"

Robert Smithson, Artist

"Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life, and perhaps you've made sense of one small area"

Nadine Gordimer, Novelist

"Once I had all the facts in, I found I didn't have the immoral courage to pull the caper. So I wrote it as a story. As a teenager, I didn't have any skills for writing as such, so it came out in 1500 words"

Theodore Sturgeon, Writer

"I loved to write when I was a child. I wrote, but I always thought it was something that you did as a child, then you put away childish things"

Rita Dove, Poet

"I really believe that studying organization, even in the form of studying detective story organization, is very, very valuable for a playwright, a budding playwright"

Peter Shaffer, Playwright

"It is very, very difficult for a playwright to write a scene in which a young man has his first deep experience of sex with a girl whom he found immensely attractive, is fully satisfied by this event and gets up and blinds a lot of horses"

Peter Shaffer, Playwright

"But the first published thing I did was a detective story, detective novel, and I did that on my own"

Peter Shaffer, Playwright

"I work with language. I love the flowers of afterthought"

Bernard Malamud, Novelist

"Sometimes I think my writing sounds like I walked out of the room and left the typewriter running"

Gene Fowler, Journalist

"Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves"

Paul Theroux, Novelist

"From Ernest Hemingway's stories, I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters"

Nadine Gordimer, Novelist

"You never quite know what's going to strike your imagination, or something that won't going to leave you alone, not going to leave alone, and this was one for me"

Peter Shaffer, Playwright

"The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes to realize that he is answerable"

Nadine Gordimer, Novelist

"When you combine something to say with the skill to say it properly, then you've got a good writer"

Theodore Sturgeon, Writer

"Who learns most from a good book is the author"

Jose Bergamin, Writer

"I don't care who you are. When you sit down to write the first page of your screenplay, in your head, you're also writing your Oscar acceptance speech"

Nora Ephron, Author

"Those who write about life, reflect about life. You see in others who you are"

Bernard Malamud, Novelist

"A writer is a spectator, looking at everything with a highly critical eye"

Bernard Malamud, Novelist

"I write a story as if it were a letter to someone and, essentially, that's what you do"

Theodore Sturgeon, Writer

"I sent The World Well Lost to one editor who rejected it on sight, and then wrote a letter to every other editor in the field warning them against the story, and urging them to reject it on sight without reading it"

Theodore Sturgeon, Writer

"Fiction is very important to me. It's what I do, it's what I do with my life"

Theodore Sturgeon, Writer

"I write short stories, and I wrote a play"

Rita Dove, Poet

"You don't sit up in a cave and write the Great American Novel and know it is utterly superb, and then throw it page by page into the fire. You just don't do that. You send it out. You have to send it out!"

Theodore Sturgeon, Writer

"Some major writers have a huge impact, like Ayn Rand, who to my mind is a lousy fiction writer because her writing has no compassion and virtually no humor. She has a philosophical and economical message that she is passing off as fiction, but it really isn't fiction at all"

Theodore Sturgeon, Writer

"It should consist of short, sharply focused sentences, each of which is a whole scene in itself"

Theodore Sturgeon, Writer

"I've always written very tightly, and there's a good reason for that. There's no point in using words that you're not going to apply"

Theodore Sturgeon, Writer

"Basically, fiction is people. You can't write fiction about ideas"

Theodore Sturgeon, Writer

"If they don't read, if they don't love reading; if they don't find themselves compulsively reading, I don't think they're really a writer"

Rita Dove, Poet

"I carry a notebook with me everywhere. But that's only the first step"

Rita Dove, Poet

"It's a very romantic sentiment, but to think that you would die if you didn't write, well, I would definitely choose to not write and live"

Sarah McLachlan, Musician

"I try to write parts for women that are as complicated and interesting as women actually are"

Nora Ephron, Author

"Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders"

Walter Bagehot, Author

"When I write an original story, I write about people I know first-hand and situations I'm familiar with. I don't write stories about the nineteenth century"

Satyajit Ray, Director

"The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything"

Walter Bagehot, Author

"It has taken me years of struggle, hard work and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence"

Isadora Duncan, Dancer

"The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter"

Isadora Duncan, Dancer

"I think Shakespeare is really the one. Words as music and music as words. Everything he wrote was good, which is really frightening!"

Don Van Vliet, Artist

"The satirist who writes nothing but satire should write but little - or it will seem that his satire springs rather from his own caustic nature than from the sins of the world in which he lives"

Anthony Trollope, Author

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