Arts, Media & Entertainment: Writing Quotes

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"But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work"

Donna Tartt, Novelist

"As soon as I began, it seemed impossible to write fast enough - I wrote faster than I would write a letter - two thousand to three thousand words in a morning, and I cannot help it"

Helen Hunt Jackson, Writer

"I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions"

James A. Michener, Novelist

"I write, but I also act"

Eric Bogosian, Actor

"I started acting when I was in high school, started writing when I got to New York in 1975"

Eric Bogosian, Actor

"I provide the bricks and mortar with the words and situations - the director and the actors and the designers build the house"

Eric Bogosian, Actor

"A novel is like a gland pill - it nips off the cream of my hysterics and gets them running on track in a book where they belong instead of rioting all over my person"

Dawn Powell, Writer

"What's lucky about my career in general is that I stumbled into what every writer most wants. Not repeating myself and doing strange things has become my trademark"

Jonathan Lethem, Writer

"It was only as I wrote about it that I began to find paths of access to feelings that were intolerable to me then"

Jonathan Lethem, Writer

"Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit"

Jonathan Lethem, Writer

"I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter"

James A. Michener, Novelist

"I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains"

James A. Michener, Novelist

"The really great writers are people like Emily Bronte, who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination"

James A. Michener, Novelist

"We're not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader's own life "outside" the story changes the story"

David Foster Wallace, Writer

"It looks like you can write a minimalist piece without much bleeding. And you can. But not a good one!"

David Foster Wallace, Writer

"To be willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I'm scared about how sappy this'll look in print, saying this"

David Foster Wallace, Writer

"It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art"

David Foster Wallace, Writer

"When I begin a book, I inevitably discover many things along the way, about the characters, their past histories and the political intrigues that surround them. This discovery process is vital, and I would not prejudice it by deciding too much in advance"

David Brin, Author

"My first duty: to write a gripping yarn. Second: is to convey credible characters who make you feel what they feel. Only third comes the idea"

David Brin, Author

"If the scripts are not good, I'll tell somebody, 'This isn't good.'"

Dick Wolf, Producer

"The storytelling gift is innate: one has it or one doesn't. But style is at least partly a learned thing: one refines it by looking and listening and reading and practice - by work"

Donna Tartt, Novelist

"The Little Friend is a long book. It's also completely different from my first novel: different landscape, different characters, different use of language and diction, different approach to story"

Donna Tartt, Novelist

"On the other hand, I mean, that is what writers have always been supposed to do, was to rely on their own devices and to - I mean, writing is a lonely business"

Donna Tartt, Novelist

"It's hard for me to show work while I'm writing, because other people's comments will influence what happens"

Donna Tartt, Novelist

"In order for a long piece of work to engage a novelist over an extended period of time, it has to deal with questions that you find very important, that you're trying to work out"

Donna Tartt, Novelist

"I'm not sure whay I've been drawn to this subject, except that murder is a subject that has always drawn people for as long as people have been telling stories"

Donna Tartt, Novelist

"I'd rather write one good book than ten mediocre ones"

Donna Tartt, Novelist

"Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel"

Donna Tartt, Novelist

"The book is openly a kind of spiritual autobiography, but the trick is that on any other level it's a kind of insane collage of fragments of memory"

Jonathan Lethem, Writer

"It's now expected of me that I will defy expectation, so I really generally seem to be free to write what I want"

Jonathan Lethem, Writer

"This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants"

David Foster Wallace, Writer

"I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader"

David Foster Wallace, Writer

"But it is a delightful challenge to try to depict interesting aliens"

David Brin, Author

"Anyone who wants simple, pat stories should buy another author's product. The real universe ain't that way, and neither are my fictive ones"

David Brin, Author

"I don't think you can really make television based on what you think audiences want. You can only make stories that you like, because you have to watch it so many times"

Dick Wolf, Producer

"So I'm not a Southern writer in the commonly held sense of the term, like Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who took the South for their entire literary environment and subject matter"

Donna Tartt, Novelist

"I really do work in solitude"

Donna Tartt, Novelist

"I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much"

Donna Tartt, Novelist

"I believe, in a funny way, the job of the novelist is to be out there on the fringes and speaking for an experience that has not really been spoken for"

Donna Tartt, Novelist

"I like to be surprised. Fresh implications and plot twists erupt as a story unfolds. Characters develop backgrounds, adding depth and feeling. Writing feels like exploring!"

David Brin, Author

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