Arts, Media & Entertainment: Writing Quotes

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"Yes, after some time spent last year on other commitments, most of them speaking engagements, I am now about halfway through a novel that I hope will come out in 1998"

Robert MacNeil, Journalist

"When I began writing science fiction in the middle '60s, it seemed very easy to find ideas that took decades to percolate into the cultural consciousness; now the lead time seems more like eighteen months"

Vernor Vinge, Writer

"I work full-time in a used bookstore. I get up. I drink a cup of coffee. I think, the last thing I want to do is write. Then I go to the computer and write"

Kate DiCamillo, Author

"Hands down, the biggest thrill is to get a letter from a kid saying, I loved your book. Will you write me another one?"

Kate DiCamillo, Author

"Everything I write comes from my childhood in one way or another. I am forever drawing on the sense of mystery and wonder and possibility that pervaded that time of my life"

Kate DiCamillo, Author

"He thinks that Schiller and St Paul were just two Partisan Review editors"

Randall Jarrell, Poet

"Writing can be a very solitary business. It's you sat at a desk typing words into a computer. It can get lonely sometimes and lots of writers live quite isolated lives"

Paul Kane, Writer

"Because I'm such a creative person, and I've always got my nose in a book, I suppose it was only a matter of time before non-fiction turned into fiction again. But I never consciously set out to become a writer and I never thought I'd be doing the things I'm doing today"

Paul Kane, Writer

"All writers are vampires"

James Gandolfini, Actor

"I think writers tend to be experience junkies, and I think they also tend to want to be on the outside looking in"

Augusten Burroughs, Writer

"And I tend to listen to NPR when I'm not writing"

Augusten Burroughs, Writer

"The most important aspect of any story, to me, is character"

Nora Roberts, Author

"Certainly the plagiarism, and dealing with the fallout of it, was the most difficult thing I've ever faced since I started writing"

Nora Roberts, Author

"Action, reaction, motivation, emotion, all have to come from the characters. Writing a love scene requires the same elements from the writer as any other"

Nora Roberts, Author

"The house burned an hour before midnight on the last day of April. The wild, distant ringing of the fire bells woke George Hazard. He stumbled through the dark hallway, then upstairs to the mansion tower, and stepped outside into the narrow balcony!"

John Jakes, Writer

"There's never a false note in a Berg novel"

Augusten Burroughs, Writer

"I was on the cover of a lot of newspapers. I was on the cover of USA Today for every single day for a month. I was on the masthead, so I tend to get recognized a lot, and in weird places. It's always flattering, and it's always odd. It's always at the worst possible time"

Augusten Burroughs, Writer

"It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable"

M. H. Abrams, Critic

"I try to find what makes even the worst, most despicable character sympathetic at his or her core"

Len Wein, Cartoonist

"Bruce Sterling is one terrific writer and he's relatively new, but I don't know how long he's been doing it; he probably doesn't need the publicity anymore!"

Larry Niven, Writer

"People are transported to that space that Poe wanted to make available to us"

John Astin, Actor

"You know, all writers are vampires, and they'll look around, and they watch you when you're not even thinking they're watching you, and they'll slip stuff in"

James Gandolfini, Actor

"The New York Quarterly is an amazing, intelligent, crazy, creative, strange, and indispensable magazine"

James Dickey, Novelist

"The writer crafts their ideal world. In my world, everyone has really long conversations or just picks apart pop culture to death, and everyone talks in monologue"

Kevin Smith, Director

"Smut, if it's really smut, there's nothing backing it up. It's the easy way out"

Sandra Bernhard, Actress

"Revising a screenplay is much more frustrating than revising a song because you have to read through the entire work again while you are changing stuff. It is a lot easier to edit a song"

Kelly Jones, Musician

"I'm a writer who likes to be influenced"

Kenneth Koch, Poet

"So I think I sometimes will put a cliche in and then just pad it out so you're not noticing"

Matthew Vaughn, Producer

"And writing, I think, is a gift that you have, the same as acting, in a way"

Matthew Vaughn, Producer

"I never take ideas from the headlines. I feel that if a story is good enough, a real story that is, then it's already been covered by the media, and if it's not good enough, why would I want to bother with it?"

Evan Hunter, Author

"I have a book coming out in September, for example, where the plot concerns counterfeiting, and I had to do a lot of research on that. Or on any legal matters, for example, I have to do a lot of research online"

Evan Hunter, Author

"When I started off with Trainspotting, it was the way the characters came to me. That's how they sounded to me. It seemed pretentious to sound any other way. I wasn't making any kind of political statement"

Irvine Welsh, Novelist

"There is a kind of mysticism to writing"

Irvine Welsh, Novelist

"I think young writers should get other degrees first, social sciences, arts degrees or even business degrees. What you learn is research skills, a necessity, because a lot of writing is about trying to find information"

Irvine Welsh, Novelist

"When I'm not writing, I read loads of fiction, but I've been writing quite constantly lately so I've been reading a lot of nonfiction - philosophy, religion, science, history, social or cultural studies"

Irvine Welsh, Novelist

"The first job of a writer is to be honest"

Irvine Welsh, Novelist

"The establishment, the newspapers, they try to create something called Scottish literature, but when people are actually going to write, they are not going to necessarily prescribe to that, they'll write what they feel"

Irvine Welsh, Novelist

"Sometimes there's a snobbery among literary types that these people don't really get it, but in a lot of ways they get it more than the literati. There's a culture in the background that they understand and know. They get that deeper level"

Irvine Welsh, Novelist

"Labels only confuse people. The smarter people recognize artists who transcend categories. But I always try to entertain. It's in my nature; writers are born to entertain. If that means working ostensibly within a genre, fine"

John Shirley, Author

"Readers are what it's all about, aren't they? If not, why am I writing?"

Evan Hunter, Author

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