Arts, Media & Entertainment: Writing Quotes

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"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

"Depending on what I'm working on, I come to the writing desk with entirely different mindsets. When I change form one to the other, it's as if another writer is on the scene!"

Evan Hunter, Author

"Sometimes, in certain stories, I think we know at the outset essentially what the tone is going to be, or it becomes important that we're groping toward some kind of story with a certain kind of tone that we both get somehow. But I don't think how that's combined with other elements is ever in any way overtly discussed"

Joel Coen, Director

"We don't know what we're writing until it just comes out. We don't sit around crunching numbers!"

Dustin Diamond, Actor

"The studios don't seem to foster good writing. They're not so interested in that, but they're more interested in what worked most recently. They're definitely very serious about making money, and that's not a wrong thing, but you don't have to make money the same way all the time"

Bill Murray, Actor

"A page of my journal is like a cake of portable soup. A little may be diffused into a considerable portion"

James Boswell, Lawyer

"I try to keep all my novels in print. Sometimes publishers don't agree with me as to their worth"

Evan Hunter, Author

"I began using pseudonyms early in my career, when I was being paid a quarter a cent a word for my work, and when I had to write a lot to earn a living. Sometimes I had three or four stories in a single magazine without the editor knowing they were all by me"

Evan Hunter, Author

"There is one thing that matters, to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people"

Logan Pearsall Smith, Critic

"The sheer complexity of writing a play always had dazzled me. In an effort to understand it, I became a critic"

Kenneth Tynan, Critic

"The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It's not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work"

Augusten Burroughs, Writer

"My only ritual is to just sit down and write, write every day"

Augusten Burroughs, Writer

"In real life, people are constantly saying one thing and doing another, but if you write your characters that way, the story becomes too hard to follow"

Jessica Cutler, Celebrity

"Like everything, what compels one to put pen to paper is a great question?"

Todd Solondz, Writer

"Once I start writing about something, it goes off rather fast, and sometimes details which might be interesting, such as what the room looked like or what somebody said that was not exactly on the same subject, tend to get lost"

Kenneth Koch, Poet

"With my own memoirs, they are truthful, and I write everything fully expecting to some day end up televised on Court TV, and I'm fully prepared to be challenged legally on it"

Augusten Burroughs, Writer

"When someone writes to tell me something I've written made them laugh or cry, I've done my job and done it well. The rest is all semantics"

Len Wein, Cartoonist

"If a story isn't working, I'm simply unable to finish it. That's what usually tells me something is wrong"

Len Wein, Cartoonist

"It won't make for a quiet life, but it will make for an interesting paper, vastly more significant, because it is doing something only a daily paper can do"

Kingman Brewster, Jr., Educator

"I love to write. I love it. I mean there's nothin in the world I like better, and that includes sex, probably because I'm so very bad at it"

Joss Whedon, Writer

"Writing is about culture and should be about everything. That's what makes it what it is"

Irvine Welsh, Novelist

"When people start writing, there is this idea that you have to get everything right first time, every sentence has to be perfect, every paragraph has to be perfect, every chapter has to be perfect, but what you're doing is not any kind of public show, until you're ready for it"

Irvine Welsh, Novelist

"Before I'm a writer, I'm definitely a reader, and when I read memoir, I really want it to be true"

Augusten Burroughs, Writer

"And we also read Newsweek, Time and several newspapers"

Hanoi Hannah, Celebrity

"I can write for a long time on one novel and not get tired"

Judith Guest, Novelist

"I wanted to be an artist. I was studying art. I wanted to be a great painter. When I went into the Navy, there wasn't much to draw at sea. So I began writing, and I began reading a lot"

Evan Hunter, Author

"Shakespeare is like mother's milk to me"

John Lithgow, Actor

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