Arts, Media & Entertainment: Writing Quotes

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"And meanwhile, the storytellers like me and Anderson, Silverberg... we tell stories. People like them. They want to know how it comes out, they want to know what the ending is"

Jerry Pournelle, Journalist

"And in down times it shakes a lot of the bad SF out, a lot the stuff that was bought for literary reasons, which is neither entertaining nor great literature"

Jerry Pournelle, Journalist

"He who would tell divers tales must know how to vary the tune"

Marie de France, Poet

"I have been a believer in the magic of language since at a very early age, I discovered that some words got me into trouble and others got me out"

Katherine Dunn, Novelist

"I don't necessarily write everything as automatically assuming it will be collected, there's nothing that says Hitman will be collected, though it might be"

Garth Ennis, Writer

"For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language"

Joseph Brodsky, Poet

"The people who don't like it tend to dislike it intensely. That's unfortunate, but not surprising when one deliberately goes against audience expectations"

John M. Ford, Writer

"Creating the fictional background for a game world isn't significantly different from creating a background for fiction"

John M. Ford, Writer

"There are a lot of editorials that have nothing to do with anything like that. But I was just thinking of that sense of prose as being very responsible and perceptive, thoughtful, intimate, and contriving a quote statement"

Robert Creeley, Poet

"When I'm writing the book, I'm laughing at just how overblown the characters seemed. How full of himself he seems. But I didn't get far enough in the series to really drive the joke of it home"

Jhonen Vasquez, Cartoonist

"Write a lot. And finish what you write. Don't join writer's clubs and go sit around having coffee reading pieces of your manuscript to people. Write it. Finish it. I set those rules up years ago, and nothing's changed"

Jerry Pournelle, Journalist

"The hard part of writing at all is sitting your ass down in a chair and writing it. There's always something better to do, like I've got an interview, sharpening the pencils, trimming the roses. There's always something better to do. Going to a writer's club?"

Jerry Pournelle, Journalist

"Working within the limitations of the shared world generally made the writing easier, because I didn't have to invent any of the characters or background, which is usually the hardest part"

Walter Jon Williams, Writer

"That's why editors and publishers will never be obsolete: A reader wants someone with taste and authority to point them in the direction of the good stuff, and to keep the awful stuff away from their door"

Walter Jon Williams, Writer

"I'm just writing a story that I want to read"

Jean M. Auel, Writer

"I started writing to please myself, a story I would like to read, and that is still true"

Jean M. Auel, Writer

"I probably read 100 times more than I write, but that way, when I move my characters through it, I know"

Jean M. Auel, Writer

"I can't tell you any more than any other writer can tell you why they write, and I don't know what my influences are"

Jean M. Auel, Writer

"My sensibility steers me toward writers who are out on their own"

Tahar Ben Jelloun, Poet

"I guess you can stay sort of true to the story; you don't have to artificially bring the character back from whatever doom you've designed for them, you can tell the story, I suppose, honestly"

Garth Ennis, Writer

"When I write now, I do not invent situation, characters, or actions, but rather structures and discursive forms, textual groupings which are combined according to secret affinities among themselves, as in architecture or the plastic arts"

Juan Goytisolo, Poet

"For a country is not merely a piece of earth; it is, above all, a compendium of social, cultural, and historical factors which begin to acquire sense and order through the process of writing"

Juan Goytisolo, Poet

"It's probably why I'm a short story writer. I tend to remember things in the past in narrative form, in story form, and I grew up around people who told stories all the time"

Tobias Wolff, Writer

"And you can tell the writers who do it - Robert Stone, for example, who with each new novel is doing something new. I appreciate that in other writers"

Tobias Wolff, Writer

"Politics aside, it will be hard for any new liberal radio network to outdo the professionalism of NPR"

Paul Weyrich, Critic

"It's the classic story form. All staying equal, or proving equal, or being equal, this will all continue, and the next time around, we'll move on to see what happened to Harry after he dove in the river, or who his friend John really was, and so on"

Robert Creeley, Poet

"After all, it is style alone by which posterity will judge of a great work, for an author can have nothing truly his own but his style"

Isaac Disraeli, Writer

"And that's what the audience was feeling too, as they watched the show and as they watch it now. And overriding all of that is the way it was written. It was written honestly. There was never any manufactured laugh. There was never compromising of character"

Mary Tyler Moore, Actress

"Animation scripts tend to be much more descriptive and are lighter on dialogue"

Douglas Wood, Writer

"All of the material for 'The Fine Line' was created via improvisation with my partner, but not in front of an audience. We'd continue to refine it in front of an audience based on their responses until it was set and scripted"

Douglas Wood, Writer

"There's a wealth of literature out there which, hopefully, will be, you know, exploded in the future, and I personally find it very rewarding to be involved with classic storytelling, and sort of legendary characters"

Sean Bean, Actor

"As a novelist, I have a somewhat higher soapbox to stand on than most people do when it comes to talking back to the merchants of fear"

L. Neil Smith, Writer

"The best way for a beginner to write for animation is to closely watch animated films, then read the screenplays for them afterwards"

Douglas Wood, Writer

"I know a lot of people in the business recommend the many Story Structure seminars being offered here, but I point to them as the single biggest contributor to lousy scripts"

Douglas Wood, Writer

"As soon as I was old enough to drive, I got a job at a local newspaper. There was someone who influenced me. He wrote a column for The Guardian from this tiny village in India"

Nicholas D. Kristof, Writer

"Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair, and can perhaps in this case save the world"

John Cheever, Writer

"Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego"

John Cheever, Writer

"We work with every one of them to see if their character wouldn't say a certain thing or if something is worded awkwardly - we work with them to rectify that"

Simon Pegg, Comedian

"In certain ways, it is incredibly damaging, considering the stuff I did before certainly wasn't for kids"

Jhonen Vasquez, Cartoonist

"I take little bits and pieces of ideas that I may or may not believe in, but I give them to this character, and he runs with them. I have fun with however he handles the situation"

Jhonen Vasquez, Cartoonist

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