Arts, Media & Entertainment: Writing Quotes

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"Some ideas you have to chew on, then roll them around a lot, play with them before you can turn them into funky science fiction"

Rudy Rucker, Scientist

"Right now, I have no idea what I will write or if I will write again"

Michael Ondaatje, Author

"I don't have a plan for a story when I sit down to write. I would get quite bored carrying it out"

Michael Ondaatje, Author

"In sheer genius Pascal ranks among the very greatest writers who have lived upon this earth. And his genius was not simply artistic; it displayed itself no less in his character and in the quality of his thought"

Lytton Strachey, Critic

"I try to sit down at the typewriter four times a day, even if it's only five minutes, and write three sentences"

Roger Zelazny, Writer

"I am most proud of the development of the characters as personalities that game players could relate to and care about"

Roberta Williams, Designer

"The test of an author is not to be found merely in the number of his phrases that pass current in the corner of newspapers... but in the number of passages that have really taken root in younger minds"

Thomas W. Higginson, Clergyman

"Having imagination, it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that, if you were unimaginative, would take you only a minute"

Franklin P. Adams, Journalist

"Most correspondents came from the former colonial powers - there were British, French, and a lot of Italians, because there were a lot of Italian communities there. And of course there were a lot of Russians"

Ryszard Kapuscinski, Journalist

"When you're writing, it's as if you're within a kind of closed world"

Michael Ondaatje, Author

"I tend not to know what the plot is or the story is or even the theme. Those things come later, for me"

Michael Ondaatje, Author

"As a writer, one is busy with archaeology"

Michael Ondaatje, Author

"The amateur is very rare in French literature - as rare as he is common in our own"

Lytton Strachey, Critic

"Englishmen have always loved Moliere"

Lytton Strachey, Critic

"A good story never dies"

Roberta Williams, Designer

"Speaking generally, people who are drawn to journalism are interested in what happens from the ground up, less than they are from the top down"

Tom Brokaw, Journalist

"I'm not against asking the audience to work, but I think what you have now is a sort of gratuitous deconstruction as a result of a fashion of literary deconstructionism indicating that there are no meanings"

Jonathan Miller, Entertainer

"The thoughts of my emotionally so disturbed days must be found again, shifted and developed further. Here and there, something of the loose remarks I make must be used, but only when it finds my attention again"

Robert Musil, Writer

"I'm trying to put more elements of the essay into my writing"

Ryszard Kapuscinski, Journalist

"Today I start a diary; it is against my usual habbits, but out of a clearly felt need"

Robert Musil, Writer

"It's a discovery of a story when I write a book, a case of inching ahead on each page and discovering what's beyond in the darkness, beyond where you're writing"

Michael Ondaatje, Author

"I'm older than my sister, so I started writing first. I started writing at school. I was always top of my class in composition, essays, English Lit and all of that"

Joan Collins, Actress

"Unlike the majority of the writers of his age, La Rochefoucauld was an aristocrat; and this fact gives a peculiar tone to his work"

Lytton Strachey, Critic

"The genius of the French language, descended from its single Latin stock, has triumphed most in the contrary direction - in simplicity, in unity, in clarity, and in restraint"

Lytton Strachey, Critic

"Modern as the style of Pascal's writing is, his thought is deeply impregnated with the spirit of the Middle Ages. He belonged, almost equally, to the future and to the past"

Lytton Strachey, Critic

"During this earlier period of his activity, Voltaire seems to have been trying - half unconsciously, perhaps - to discover and to express the fundamental quality of his genius"

Lytton Strachey, Critic

"You're getting everyone's point of view at the same time, which, for me, is the perfect state for a novel: a cubist state, the cubist novel"

Michael Ondaatje, Author

"It's a responsibility of the writer to get the reader out of the story somehow"

Michael Ondaatje, Author

"I don't see novels ending with any real sense of closure"

Michael Ondaatje, Author

"How far the existence of the Academy has influenced French literature, either for good or for evil, is an extremely dubious question"

Lytton Strachey, Critic

"All the revision in the world will not save a bad first draft: for the architecture of the thing comes, or fails to come, in the first conception, and revision only affects the detail and ornament, alas!"

T. E. Lawrence, Archaeologist

"If I've done my work well, I vanish completely from the scene. I believe it is invasive of the work when you know too much about the writer"

Mary Oliver, Poet

"No one wants to know how clever you are. They don't want an insight into your mind, thrilling as it might be. They want an insight into their own"

Mark Haddon, Novelist

"If one book's done this well, you want to write another one that does just as well. There's that horror of the second novel that doesn't match up"

Mark Haddon, Novelist

"I think most writers feel like they're on the outside looking in much of the time. All of us feel, to a certain extent, alienated from the stuff going on around us"

Mark Haddon, Novelist

"Men like women who write. Even though they don't say so. A writer is a foreign country"

Marguerite Duras, Novelist

"I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate"

Marguerite Duras, Novelist

"Writers sometimes give up what is most strange and wonderful about their writing - soften their roughest edges - to accommodate themselves toward a group response"

Mary Oliver, Poet

"The one thing you have to do if you write a book is put yourself in someone else's shoes. The reader's shoes. You've got to entertain them"

Mark Haddon, Novelist

"The hard fact is that not everyone does get published"

Rudy Rucker, Scientist

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