Arts, Media & Entertainment: Writing Quotes

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"I love writing dialogue, and I think a lot of my writing is visual and very cinematic"

Jessica Hagedorn, Playwright

"I have only one loyalty - to my writing. I never wanted to be the head of a studio or a producer"

Joe Eszterhas, Writer

"I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction"

J. M. Coetzee, Author

"If you look at the publishers I've worked with, generally, they're a great bunch. Creation is unlike any other publishing house you can think of. The people I've worked with have integrity and intelligence and, almost always, less money than ideas"

Peter Sotos, Writer

"Oh, it's essential. I mean, you have to - if I'm writing about the Middle East, I have to go there, and if possible, stay long enough to get a real feeling for what's going on"

Joe Sacco, Journalist

"News, if unreported, has no impact. It might as well have not happened at all"

Gay Talese, Journalist

"One thing I can tell you is this: that I am not a methodical writer"

Wole Soyinka, Dramatist

"I need some kind of emotional stake in it to write my lyrics, assuming that place. It might just be an emotion I understand but am not currently experiencing necessarily"

John Mayer, Musician

"In the best material, you always should be able to somehow make a case for a story to be transposed to any other time"

Ralph Fiennes, Actor

"I got to read some writings by serial killers, and they got inside my head. They were quite disturbing. I read disturbing stuff about that very detached way of manipulating people to do things"

Ralph Fiennes, Actor

"I find it somewhat difficult to write with other people, although it has happened occasionally"

Graham Nash, Musician

"Sometimes you get a glimpse of a semicolon coming, a few lines farther on, and it is like climbing a steep path through woods and seeing a wooden bench just at a bend in the road ahead, a place where you can expect to sit for a moment, catching your breath"

Lewis Thomas, Scientist

"Writers always know whether you like them or not"

Leslie Fiedler, Critic

"Hemingway seems to be in a funny position. People nowadays can't identify with him closely as a member of their own generation, and he isn't yet historical"

Leslie Fiedler, Critic

"Cooper wrote a novel which is absolutely indistinguishable from Austen, completely from a female point of view, completely English, no sense that he was an American"

Leslie Fiedler, Critic

"That has always seemed to me one of the stranger aspects of literary fame: you prove your competence as a writer and an inventor of stories, and then people clamour for you to make speeches and tell them what you think about the world"

J. M. Coetzee, Author

"Finally, when the money was high enough, the script suddenly revealed itself as being very clear to me"

Robert Vaughn, Actor

"I was always looking for the most dramatic emphasis"

Neil LaBute, Director

"You write it down because finally, when it's written down, you do get it out of your system somewhat"

Leo Ornstein, Composer

"When somebody asks me what I do, I don't think I'd say critic. I say writer"

Leslie Fiedler, Critic

"The novel doesn't come into existence until certain methods of reproducing fiction come along"

Leslie Fiedler, Critic

"I think Henry Miller has had huge influence not because he wrote about sex, but because the memoir or the nonfiction novel has become such a monumental force in American publishing, if not in literature"

Leslie Fiedler, Critic

"I liked Camille Paglia. I liked her even better when I heard her talk"

Leslie Fiedler, Critic

"DeLillo never seems committed to me to what he is writing. Very nice surfaces, but he's got nothing underneath"

Leslie Fiedler, Critic

"I never take any notes or draw charts or make elaborate diagrams, but I hold an image of the shape of a book in my head and work from that mental hologram"

Jonathan Lethem, Writer

"I had always wanted to be a writer who confused genre boundaries and who was read in multiple contexts"

Jonathan Lethem, Writer

"Satire is people as they are; romanticism, people as they would like to be; realism, people as they seem with their insides left out"

Dawn Powell, Writer

"I hate biographies which say, I was called to such and such an office, and he offered me so and so, and I got so and so money. I find that very tedious. The best biographies are written by other people"

Leslie Caron, Actress

"I think there have been some periods when the writing almost became a bit of a burden"

Leo Ornstein, Composer

"Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory"

Kazuo Ishiguro, Author

"I think I had actually served my apprenticeship as a writer of fiction by writing all those songs. I had already been through phases of autobiographical or experimental stuff"

Kazuo Ishiguro, Author

"I've written only two novels, but they're both long ones, and they each took a decade to write"

Donna Tartt, Novelist

"I think it's hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence"

Donna Tartt, Novelist

"I keep one simple rule that I only move in one direction - I write the book straight through from beginning to end. By following time's arrow, I keep myself sane"

Jonathan Lethem, Writer

"I just noticed recently that in one book after another, I seem to find an excuse to find some character who, to put it idiotically simply, is allowed to talk crazy"

Jonathan Lethem, Writer

"There's no doubt that scientific training helps many authors to write better science fiction. And yet, several of the very best were English majors who could not parse a differential equation to save their lives"

David Brin, Author

"I would normally never set out to write a trilogy"

David Brin, Author

"If all I ever wrote about was inner city freaks, I think it would be dishonest"

Eric Bogosian, Actor

"I write for an audience that likes what I like, reads what I read, thinks about the things I think about. In many ways, this puts me in opposition to the people who go to the theater generally"

Eric Bogosian, Actor

"The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush"

David Foster Wallace, Writer

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