Arts, Media & Entertainment: Writing Quotes

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"When people say there is too much violence in my books, what they are saying is there is too much reality in life"

Joyce Carol Oates, Novelist

"I write and rewrite and rewrite and write and like to turn in what I think is finished work"

Gay Talese, Journalist

"I could come up with 50 stories that I am thinking about"

Gay Talese, Journalist

"It's good to stay as close to real life as you can, and then kind of dress it up"

Nelson DeMille, Author

"I tried to write with someone else once before, but it was not successful"

Paula Danziger, Author

"I attempt to write a good novel. Whether it is literature or not is something that will be decided by the ages, not by me and not by a pack of critics around the globe"

Elizabeth George, Author

"Silk Road to Ruin has all the analysis and it's structured very well. I rely on my notes more and I use direct quotes. But there's nothing like writing about it right away"

Ted Rall, Cartoonist

"I'm a better polemicist in prose"

Ted Rall, Cartoonist

"I often reread books I have written"

Taylor Caldwell, Author

"I love the paranormal because there every genre I write can become one beacon for my imagination"

Leslie Banks, Actor

"I consider the process of gestation just as important as when you're actually sitting down, putting words to the paper"

Wole Soyinka, Dramatist

"The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language"

Paul de Man, Critic

"The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear - and even, in certain respects, would be - the most modern of critical movements"

Paul de Man, Critic

"In Poland, my audience is all women between 18 and 30. At U.S. conventions, you have the fantasy and science fiction crowd. At Harvard you have an entirely different audience. It's so schizophrenic"

Jonathan Carroll, Author

"If I don't feel like writing today or for a few days, I don't. And I don't think about it. It is not an obligation-it is the greatest privilege"

Jonathan Carroll, Author

"In my next life, I want to be tall and thin, parallel park and make good coffee. But for now, I have lots of stuff to work out in my life, but I'll have that until the day I die. I want to write more books"

Paula Danziger, Author

"I'm very lucky. I'm very fortunate that my books have never gone out of print - none of them"

Paula Danziger, Author

"I don't know what issues concerning identity have helped contemporary fiction evolve to what it is now. All I know is that the range of voices that are being heard and published is a lot more diverse than when I was coming up"

Jessica Hagedorn, Playwright

"When I was there, something clicked in my head; I found myself interviewing people, searching out facts and figures. Later on I became much more self-conscious of what I was doing"

Joe Sacco, Journalist

"I am writing about people who are alive in the city of New York during mid-20th-century America. And these people are like a character in a play or they are figures in a short story or a novel"

Gay Talese, Journalist

"For example, many colleges in their writing programs teach some of my work"

Gay Talese, Journalist

"Lots of people want to have written; they don't want to write. In other words, they want to see their name on the front cover of a book and their grinning picture on the back. But this is what comes at the end of a job, not at the beginning"

Elizabeth George, Author

"It is the job of the novelist to touch the reader"

Elizabeth George, Author

"Out of the past come the standards for judging the present; standards in turn to be shaped by the practice of present-day dramatists into broader standards for the next generation"

George P. Baker, Writer

"In the best farce today we start with some absurd premise as to character or situation, but if the premises be once granted we move logically enough to the ending"

George P. Baker, Writer

"Drama read to oneself is never drama at its best, and is not even drama as it should be"

George P. Baker, Writer

"I'm not one of those writers I learned about who get up in the morning, put a piece of paper in their typewriter machine and start writing. That I've never understood"

Wole Soyinka, Dramatist

"I just wanted to make sure that what I write is what appears on screen, to not have some idiot change it on its way to the screen"

Joe Eszterhas, Writer

"I had read too many memoirs that were written after the writer or the director was past his or her prime"

Joe Eszterhas, Writer

"From a writing point of view, you now have teams of screenwriters working with a director. What's lost in the process is the power of that one heart, brain, gut and soul that makes something an original piece of writing"

Joe Eszterhas, Writer

"I don't publish the books to make money, not at all"

Peter Sotos, Writer

"When I went to Bosnia, I was there to tell someone else's story and I was more methodical"

Joe Sacco, Journalist

"If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction?"

J. M. Coetzee, Author

"I see no marks of Wordsworth's style of writing or style of thinking in my own work, yet Wordsworth is a constant presence when I write about human beings and their relations to the natural world"

J. M. Coetzee, Author

"But the ultimate lesson is just sit down and write. That's all"

Wole Soyinka, Dramatist

"As you see, I do not treat the creation of fiction, that to say the invention and development of fantasies, as a form of abstract thought. I don't wish to deny the uses of the intellect, but sometimes one has the intuition that the intellect by itself will lead one nowhere"

J. M. Coetzee, Author

"Very often I'll find out at the end of a book what I put in at the beginning. A sort of process of elimination and discovery in one"

Jonathan Carroll, Author

"I read less of everything now. With only fond memories of others' work, it will be interesting to give my own journal writing a try now"

Jonathan Carroll, Author

"The writers who have the deepest influence on one are those one reads in one's more impressionable early life, and often it is the more youthful works of those writers that leave the deepest imprint"

J. M. Coetzee, Author

"Buzzwords and cliches - those are stock in trade. There's nothing wrong with them"

Michael Nesmith, Musician

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