Arts, Media & Entertainment: Writing Quotes

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"I got done writing Ports of Call and suddenly realized I have far too much material for the book"

Jack Vance, Author

"Sometimes you're not even sure which of your stories were failures. There are things I've written that I thought were complete catastrophes when I finished with them that have gone on to generate some of my most positive feedback"

Len Wein, Cartoonist

"I don't like to read novels where the novelist tells me what to think about the situation and the characters. I prefer to discover for myself"

Frederick Wiseman, Director

"These things are hard to pin down. We work on a script a bit, then work on a different one"

Joel Coen, Director

"It would have been easier to have a male protagonist, but I didn't want people to assume that Nikki Hill was me in her entirety because a lot of people just don't like me and I don't think they would be interested in reading about me, even in the fictional context"

Christopher Darden, Lawyer

"I'm real bent on dialogue. I'm just a little bit crazy and when you put that along with 20 years as a criminal lawyer, it's pretty easy to come up with some interesting plots"

Christopher Darden, Lawyer

"I think that, as I continue to write, my writing, I hope, will become more controversial and more provocative"

Christopher Darden, Lawyer

"I began writing in the 4th grade. As a matter of fact, I produced a play for the entire school. It was about Leif Ericson and the discovery of America"

Christopher Darden, Lawyer

"Feedback is a pleasant thing. I get a lot of letters from unexpected people in unexpected places"

Brian Aldiss, Writer

"You do it a day at a time. You write as well as you can, you put it in the mail, you leave it under submission, you never leave it at home"

James Lee Burke, Author

"Great questions make great reporting"

Diane Sawyer, Journalist

"It is mere coincidence that Cooper was born in the year which produced The Power of Sympathy and that when he died Uncle Tom's Cabin was passing through its serial stage, and yet the limits of his life mark almost exactly the first great period of American fiction"

Carl Clinton Van Doren, Critic

"In fiction, too, after the death of Cooper the main tendency for nearly a generation was away from the conquest of new borders to the closer cultivation, east of the Mississippi, of ground already marked"

Carl Clinton Van Doren, Critic

"It is comparatively easy to become a writer; staying a writer, resisting formulaic work, generating one's own creativity - that's a much tougher matter"

Brian Aldiss, Writer

"It's all about creating a back story for the character and developing emotional responses that are true to life in relation to the character. It isn't necessary to live a tragic life to create from that place"

Corin Nemec, Actor

"I believe that writing is derivative. I think good writing comes from good reading"

Charles Kuralt, Journalist

"For a while there, I was a stringer. The expression comes from the old habit of stringing together the column inches that you had written. They'd measure it and pay you 10 cents an inch for your printed copy"

Charles Kuralt, Journalist

"In each of my characters there is a little of me. Not strictly autobiographical but a little piece of my soul"

Dario Argento, Director

"Well, it was sent to me, well, because almost everything that is written in Baltimore is sent to me. And David Simon, who was a writer for the Baltimore Sun, spent one year following the homicide squad in Baltimore and he chronicled that period of time"

Barry Levinson, Director

"I enjoy writing for third and fourth graders most of all"

Beverly Cleary, Author

"Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers"

Alain de Botton, Writer

"I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay, rather than the novel"

Alain de Botton, Writer

"I never really wanted to be an actor. And that was the beginning of it, I began to write things down and eventually became a writer on a television show"

Barry Levinson, Director

"I would still like to have that luxury, to be able to just sit and draw for hours and hours and hours. In a way, that's what I do as a writer"

Amy Tan, Novelist

"I thought I was clever enough to write as well as these people, and I didn't realize that there is something called originality and your own voice"

Amy Tan, Novelist

"It's a luxury being a writer, because all you ever think about is life"

Amy Tan, Novelist

"I also thought of playing improvisational jazz, and I did take lessons for a while. At first I tried to write fiction by making up things that were completely alien to my life"

Amy Tan, Novelist

"No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing"

Mario Vargas Llosa, Writer

"I've gotten a lot of livid letters about the awfulness of my work. I've never known what to make of it. Why do people bother to write if they hate what I do?"

Lynda Barry, Cartoonist

"Literature is always trying to show other parts of this immense universe in which we live. It's endless. I'm sure there will be other writers who will discover new worlds"

Nathalie Sarraute, Lawyer

"Stories had always been told about male genies coming out of bottles, but they were usually fat, old men. Never had the genie been a gorgeous woman, so that idea really appealed to me, and I created the series based on that premise"

Sidney Sheldon, Novelist

"In a novel, on the other hand, you not only have to describe the rooms, but the clothes, the characters and what they are thinking. It's a much more in-depth process"

Sidney Sheldon, Novelist

"If there is any secret to my success, I think it's that my characters are very real to me. I feel everything they feel, and therefore I think my readers care about them"

Sidney Sheldon, Novelist

"The problem, for me, with the writing programs is that they produce a terrible uniformity of product"

Peter Davison, Actor

"I'm one of those writers who, when writing, believes she's God-and that she hasn't bestowed free will on any of her characters. In that sense there are no surprises in any of my books"

Lynn Abbey, Author

"For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel"

Lynn Abbey, Author

"A good short-story writer has an instinct for sketching in just enough background to ground the specific story"

Lynn Abbey, Author

"Use not big words for naught"

L. M. Heroux, Writer

"I'm a games and theory kind of guy. I love puzzles, so it was fun dissecting Shakespeare's prose"

Neil Patrick Harris, Actor

"You see, I was told stories, we were all told stories as kids in Nigeria. We had to tell stories that would keep one another interested, and you weren't allowed to tell stories that everybody else knew. You had to dream up new ones"

Ben Okri, Poet

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