Arts, Media & Entertainment: Writing Quotes

Similar topics:Anime Art Games Movie Music Poetry

"The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature"

Paul de Man, Critic

"There's almost always a point in a book where something happens that triggers the rest of the plot"

Jonathan Carroll, Author

"It's a perfectly valid position to not like Shakespeare"

Ted Rall, Cartoonist

"Most people don't know how to tell stories"

Ted Rall, Cartoonist

"When the drama attains a characterization which makes the play a revelation of human conduct and a dialogue which characterizes yet pleases for itself, we reach dramatic literature"

George P. Baker, Writer

"Book tours are almost designed to beat out of an author any affection he has for his book"

Michael Lewis, Writer

"But novels are never about what they are about; that is, there is always deeper, or more general, significance. The author may not be aware of this till she is pretty far along with it"

Diane Johnson, Novelist

"A novel's whole pattern is rarely apparent at the outset of writing, or even at the end; that is when the writer finds out what a novel is about, and the job becomes one of understanding and deepening or sharpening what is already written. That is finding the theme"

Diane Johnson, Novelist

"You want the book to be special, and they are not always going to be special, but at least you want that to be the ambition. So the only way that happens is if you are not pressing to write a book"

Michael Lewis, Writer

"Well, there are more writers of blogs right now than there are readers, so that's clearly a vanity phenomenon"

John Doerr, Businessman

"Even in a less exaggerated description, any verbal account of a person is bound to find itself employing an assortment of waterfalls, lightning rods, landscapes, birds, etc"

Sergei Eisenstein, Director

"If you want to use a cliche you must take full responsibility for it yourself and not try to fob it off on anon, or on society"

Lewis Thomas, Scientist

"When I put together a graphic novel, I don't think about literary prose. I think about storytelling"

Ted Rall, Cartoonist

"To conclude: good journalism is one of the models of good conversation and communication in the wider social context"

Rowan D. Williams, Clergyman

"I've always had an abundance of material about the subjects of my biographies"

Walter Isaacson, Writer

"If it is indeed impossible - or at least very difficult - to inhabit the consciousness of an animal, then in writing about animals there is a temptation to project upon them feelings and thoughts that may belong only to our own human mind and heart"

J. M. Coetzee, Author

"Writing the story of your own life is a bit like drilling your own teeth"

Gloria Swanson, Actress

"As a print journalist, you can be frustrated by people who don't call you back, parts of the story you can't get. TV gets you access to everyone because people call you back. It also allows you to satisfy your curiosity. I am a very curious person"

Tucker Carlson, Journalist

"I have written two medical novels. I have never studied medicine, never seen an operation"

Taylor Caldwell, Author

"The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role!"

J. M. Coetzee, Author

"Gene Roddenberry was a genius"

Persis Khambatta, Actress

"I have my own language and it's high time I put a little of it out there"

Paul Westerberg, Musician

"One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like"

Leslie Fiedler, Critic

"Since, therefore, individuals as well as the public are so indebted to these writers for the benefits they enjoy, I think them not only entitled to the honour of palms and crowns, but even to be numbered among the gods"

Marcus V. Pollio, Architect

"Kafka is still unrecognized. He thought he was a comic writer?"

Leslie Fiedler, Critic

"Henry Miller wrote novels, but he calls his protagonist Henry, often Henry Miller, and his books are in this gray area between memoir and novel"

Leslie Fiedler, Critic

"How could I make a little book, when I have seen enough to make a dozen large books?"

John James Audubon, Scientist

"One of the great pressures we're facing in journalism now is it's a lot cheaper to hire thumb suckers and pundits and have talk shows on the air than actually have bureaus and reporters"

Walter Isaacson, Writer

"The genre of fantasy is about magic and occult characters"

Shawn Ashmore, Actor

"In its conception, the literature prize belongs to days when a writer could still be thought of as, by virtue of his or her occupation, a sage, someone with no institutional affiliations who could offer an authoritative word on our times as well as on our moral life"

J. M. Coetzee, Author

"I would be more frightened as a writer if people thought my movies were like science fiction"

Neil LaBute, Director

"My business is can I create a world that's possible and could happen? I think that's the only thing that I have to do, and I think that I have done that each time"

Neil LaBute, Director

"I have been working up until recently with Neil Simon, who has been adapting the character to me"

Paula Abdul, Musician

"When you're sent something and read it, either you can see it while you read it, or you can't"

Steven Soderbergh, Director

"Generally, my writing is influenced by living, by absorbing everything that happens to me and my actions"

Graham Nash, Musician

"I mean simply to say that I want my characters to suggest the background in themselves, even when it is not visible. I want them to be so powerfully realized that we cannot imagine them apart from their physical and social context, even when we see them in empty space"

Michelangelo Antonioni, Director

"Jane Austen is at the end of the line that begins with Samuel Richardson, which takes wonder and magic out of the novel, treats not the past but the present"

Leslie Fiedler, Critic

"I've had a tough time with Pynchon. I liked him very much when I first read him. I liked him less with each book. He got denser and more complex in a way that didn't really pay off"

Leslie Fiedler, Critic

"I have, I admit, a low tolerance for detached chronicling and cool analysis"

Leslie Fiedler, Critic

"I think that any reporter or columnist will be a little more careful when doing interviews with me"

Mark Cuban, Businessman

Page 51 of 130