Arts, Media & Entertainment: Writing Quotes

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"Selling a book or story has never become absolutely automatic for me"

Rudy Rucker, Scientist

"Advice to beginning SF writers? Write a lot, finish what you write, and when it's done, keep sending it out for quite awhile"

Rudy Rucker, Scientist

"Once I've discovered the story, I might restructure it, maybe move things around, set up a clue that something is going to happen later, but that happens much later in an editorial capacity"

Michael Ondaatje, Author

"English dramatic literature is, of course, dominated by Shakespeare; and it is almost inevitable that an English reader should measure the value of other poetic drama by the standards which Shakespeare has already implanted in his mind"

Lytton Strachey, Critic

"It is to be noted that when any part of this paper appears dull, there is a design in it"

Richard Steele, Dramatist

"Avoid context and specifics; generalize and keep repeating the generalization"

Jack Schwartz, Scientist

"You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel"

Michael Ondaatje, Author

"To write about someone like myself would be very limiting"

Michael Ondaatje, Author

"Research can be a big clunker. It's difficult to know how you can make the historical light"

Michael Ondaatje, Author

"It doubles your perception, to write from the point of view of someone you're not"

Michael Ondaatje, Author

"And then I wrote my first autobiography when I - well, it was 23 years ago. And since then I've written about one book every two years"

Joan Collins, Actress

"When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language"

James Earl Jones, Actor

"And I used to write novels and little stories and compositions and I - but I put them away because I started acting when I was 17. So there wasn't much time"

Joan Collins, Actress

"As a writer, you have control of the words you put on the page. But once that manuscript leaves your hand, you give control to the reader. As a director, you are limited by everything: weather, budget, and egos"

Nicholas Meyer, Writer

"I have a notebook with me all the time, and I begin scribbling a few words. When things are going well, the walk does not get anywhere; I finally just stop and write"

Mary Oliver, Poet

"I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad"

Mark Haddon, Novelist

"I knew there was a story; once you find a dog with a fork through it, you know there's a story there"

Mark Haddon, Novelist

"Of all the species of literary composition, perhaps biography is the most delightful. The attention concentrated on one individual gives a unity to the materials of which it is composed, which is wanting in general history"

Robert Hall, Clergyman

"I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the powers of observing"

Mary Oliver, Poet

"My book has a very simple surface, but there are layers of irony and paradox all the way through it"

Mark Haddon, Novelist

"Most of my work consisted of crossing out. Crossing out was the secret of all good writing"

Mark Haddon, Novelist

"If you enjoy math and you write novels, it's very rare that you'll get a chance to put your math into a novel. I leapt at the chance"

Mark Haddon, Novelist

"I don't mean that literary fiction is better than genre fiction, On the contrary; novels can perform two functions and most perform only one"

Mark Haddon, Novelist

"I better make the plot good. I wanted to make it grip people on the first page and have a big turning point in the middle, as there is, and construct the whole thing like a roller coaster ride"

Mark Haddon, Novelist

"Well, I must tell you, I write the scripts very close to the bone. So I'm writing episode seven now and couldn't tell you what happens in episode eight"

Aaron Sorkin, Producer

"Writing of that caliber spoils you for any other kind of writing for awhile. But that's probably good"

Mercedes Ruehl, Actress

"I think the U.K. is too small to write about from within it and still make it seem foreign and exotic and interesting"

Mark Haddon, Novelist

"I'm just not that fascinating a person to have had all those lives that I've written about"

Michael Stipe, Musician

"Writers should be read but not seen. Rarely are they a winsome sight"

Edna Ferber, Novelist

"Life can't defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death"

Edna Ferber, Novelist

"I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence"

Don DeLillo, Novelist

"There'll come a writing phase where you have to defend the time, unplug the phone and put in the hours to get it done"

James Taylor, Musician

"There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live"

Don DeLillo, Novelist

"It's no accident that my first novel was called Americana. This was a private declaration of independence, a statement of my intention to use the whole picture, the whole culture"

Don DeLillo, Novelist

"For me, writing is a concentrated form of thinking"

Don DeLillo, Novelist

"American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous"

Don DeLillo, Novelist

"Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright"

Aaron Sorkin, Producer

"There's a great tradition in storytelling that's thousands of years old, telling stories about kings and their palaces, and that's really what I wanted to do"

Aaron Sorkin, Producer

"Our responsibility is to captivate you for however long we've asked for your attention. That said, there is tremendous drama to be gotten from the great, what you would say, heavy issues"

Aaron Sorkin, Producer

"One truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language"

Don DeLillo, Novelist

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