Arts, Media & Entertainment: Writing Quotes

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"I like that people who are not experts can not only understand but get engaged by my work. I like that Joe Paterno can read me. Bill Bradley"

Leslie Fiedler, Critic

"If you look at my last songs and first short stories, there is a real connection between them"

Kazuo Ishiguro, Author

"Faulkner sat in our living room and read from Light in August. That was incredible!"

Leslie Fiedler, Critic

"Critics? How do they happen? I know how it happened to me. I would send a poem or story to a magazine, and they would say, this doesn't suit our needs precisely, but on the other hand, you sound interesting. Would you be interested in doing a review?"

Leslie Fiedler, Critic

"Shakespeare tells the same stories over and over in so many guises that it takes a long time before you notice"

Howard Nemerov, Poet

"A chronicle is very different from history proper"

Howard Nemerov, Poet

"I'm trying my hand at writing. I'm writing a couple of projects for HBO, a half hour comedy and a miniseries"

Charles S. Dutton, Actor

"You start as an audience member and create a world you're interested in, and then you move into the telling of those stories, bringing what has interested you as an audience member"

Neil LaBute, Director

"People think my work is therapeutic. I don't see it that way. It's not like I'm saving money from a weekly therapy visit by writing down my life"

Neil LaBute, Director

"And I've got some screenplays and plays ready to dip into when I need to"

Neil LaBute, Director

"When I was speaking about communicating, I meant that the listener - we have to reach the listener; otherwise, of course, you're writing the piece, as I say, only for the satisfaction of seeing it on the paper for yourself, and then it ends right there"

Leo Ornstein, Composer

"Now, there are sometimes making a connection between one section and another that sometimes you do want to see the pattern because it helps you to lead into the next thing - it's a rhetorical thing, where you just see how the pattern has to go into the next thing"

Leo Ornstein, Composer

"Lord of the Rings is a good thing for us because it opened the door for the genre in general. Le Guin's stories are very different from Lord of the Rings"

Shawn Ashmore, Actor

"I want to tell a story and shape it all the way through to the end"

Conrad Hall, Artist

"Occasionally a student writer comes up with something really beautiful and moving, and you won't know for years if it was an accident or the first burst of something wonderful"

Howard Nemerov, Poet

"The world is crawling with authors touring now. They're like performance artists"

Kazuo Ishiguro, Author

"Screenplays I didn't really care about, journalism, travel books, getting my writer friends to write about their dreams or something. I just determined to write the books I had to write"

Kazuo Ishiguro, Author

"I was a little concerned that a lot of people thought I wrote Merchant Ivory movies. I also thought if I was ever going to write something strange and difficult, that was the time"

Kazuo Ishiguro, Author

"My fiction has been influenced by the visual arts, though not in obvious ways, it seems to me. I don't offer tremendous amounts of visual information in my work"

Jonathan Lethem, Writer

"In my third novel, there is an actual black hole that swallows everything you love"

Jonathan Lethem, Writer

"I'd have been a filmmaker or a cartoonist or something else which extended from the visual arts into the making of narratives, if I hadn't been able to shift into fiction"

Jonathan Lethem, Writer

"No thesaurus can give you those words, no rhyming dictionary. They must happen out of you"

Dorothy Fields, Musician

"If you don't have a story that will hold the audience, you won't have a successful show"

Dorothy Fields, Musician

"I began to be impressed by what made a good book-how you needed to have a sensible story, a plot that developed, with a beginning, a middle, and an end that would tie everything together"

Dorothy Fields, Musician

"I didn't want to play these people any more songs and have them say that they weren't good enough. So my response was to just not be able to write anymore. I know that's not the healthiest of responses"

Aimee Mann, Musician

"For me, there's a fine line between telling a story that's fictional with lots of details and then removing yourself too much from it, so it's bloodless, a little too fictional"

Aimee Mann, Musician

"For a Jewish Puritan of the middle class, the novel is serious, the novel is work, the novel is conscientious application, why, the novel is practically the retail business all over again"

Howard Nemerov, Poet

"I think the crucial thing in the writing career is to find what you want to do and how you fit in. What somebody else does is of no concern whatever except as an interesting variation"

James A. Michener, Novelist

"I was very happy sitting alone at a dining room table, writing a script"

Conrad Hall, Artist

"I write my plays to create an excuse for full-tilt acting and performing"

Eric Bogosian, Actor

"I don't paint anymore. I haven't since I abandoned it at 19, in order to begin writing seriously"

Jonathan Lethem, Writer

"Russia, France, Germany and China. They revere their writers. America is still a frontier country that almost shudders at the idea of creative expression"

James A. Michener, Novelist

"The story drove the book. That had a very seminal effect on the way I saw writing and storytelling. If you can set a character in a story that is compelling and has a backbone, you draw people in"

Dick Wolf, Producer

"There's a practical problem about time and energy, and a more subtle problem of what it does to a writer's head, to continually analyze why they write, where it all comes from, where it's going to"

Kazuo Ishiguro, Author

"The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up"

Donna Tartt, Novelist

"My play Safe Sex was picked apart because critics thought it was untrue. It was a play in which no one had AIDS, but the characters talked about how it was going to change their lives"

Harvey Fierstein, Actor

"When you write, it doesn't occur to you that somebody could think different from what you do"

Howard Nemerov, Poet

"If anyone was talking about journalism in the '50s - it was Edward R.Murrow"

David Strathairn, Actor

"I plan less and less. It's a great benefit of writing lots, that you get good at holding long narratives in your head like a virtual space"

Jonathan Lethem, Writer

"I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive"

Donna Tartt, Novelist

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