Arts, Media & Entertainment: Writing Quotes

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"Who knows where inspiration comes from. Perhaps it arises from desperation. Perhaps it comes from the flukes of the universe, the kindness of the muses!"

Amy Tan, Novelist

"I started a second novel seven times and I had to throw them away"

Amy Tan, Novelist

"I don't have any well-developed philosophy about journalism. Ultimately it is important in a society like this, so people can know about everything that goes wrong"

Charles Kuralt, Journalist

"I could tell you which writer's rhythms I am imitating. It's not exactly plagiarism, it's falling in love with good language and trying to imitate it"

Charles Kuralt, Journalist

"The English people, a lot of them, would not be able to understand a word of spoken Shakespeare. There are people who do and I'm not denying they exist. But it's a far more philistine country than people think"

Colin Firth, Actor

"I am a struggling writer. A middle-aged man with two little kids and I'm just trying to earn a living. So buy this book - or my kids will have to go to foster care"

Christopher Darden, Lawyer

"I am conscious of trying to stretch the boundaries of non-fiction writing. It's always surprised me how little attention many non-fiction writers pay to the formal aspects of their work"

Alain de Botton, Writer

"Yes, it's hard to write. But it's harder not to"

Carl Clinton Van Doren, Critic

"Although by 1851 tales of adventure had begun to seem antiquated, they had rendered a large service to the course of literature: they had removed the stigma, for the most part, from the word novel"

Carl Clinton Van Doren, Critic

"I've always looked upon the Ducks as caricature human beings. Perhaps I've been years writing in that middle world that J.R.R. Tolkien describes, and never knew it"

Carl Barks, Artist

"Placing on writers the responsibility to represent a culture is an onerous burden"

Amy Tan, Novelist

"I wanted to write stories for myself. At first it was purely an aesthetic thing about craft. I just wanted to become good at the art of something. And writing was very private"

Amy Tan, Novelist

"I would find myself laughing and wondering where these ideas came from. You can call it imagination, I suppose. But I was grateful for wherever they came from!"

Amy Tan, Novelist

"I have a writer's memory, which makes everything worse than maybe it actually was"

Amy Tan, Novelist

"The first writers are first and the rest, in the long run, nowhere but in anthologies"

Carl Clinton Van Doren, Critic

"Writers are good at plucking out what they need here and there"

Beverly Cleary, Author

"I read my books aloud before they were published"

Beverly Cleary, Author

"People are inclined to say that I am Ramona. I'm not sure that's true, but I did share some experiences with her"

Beverly Cleary, Author

"The way to write is well, and how is your own business"

A. J. Liebling, Journalist

"After Proust, there are certain things that simply cannot be done again. He marks off for you the boundaries of your talent"

Francoise Sagan, Playwright

"Cathy was the first widely syndicated humor strip created by a woman. The strip was pretty revolutionary at the time, not only because it starred a female, but also because it was so emotionally honest about all the conflicting feelings many women had in 1976"

Cathy Guisewite, Cartoonist

"This was something that was obsessing me and creating a writer's block. To get involved and get stuck in, get the proper information about what's going on has really helped"

Thom Yorke, Musician

"Traditional copyright has been that you can't make a full copy of somebody's work without their permission"

Patricia Schroeder, Leader

"Now, I'll tell you something that might interest you. Casino Royale was the first Bond book that Ian Fleming ever wrote. And he couldn't get anybody to touch it, to publish it - he couldn't do anything about it at all. Nobody wanted to know"

Val Guest, Director

"I used to write bits and pieces of comedy material for various comics that were at the Windmill... As well as my film job, I was under contract, I was allowed to do that and everything"

Val Guest, Director

"And he said that he wrote the Bond character based on the character of David Niven. That's how he saw Bond"

Val Guest, Director

"Shaw is like a train. One just speaks the words and sits in one's place. But Shakespeare is like bathing in the sea - one swims where one wants"

Vivien Leigh, Actress

"When you're a writer, you no longer see things with the freshness of the normal person. There are always two figures that work inside you"

Brian Moore, Novelist

"Writers really live in the mind and in hotels of the soul"

Edna O'Brien, Novelist

"My hand does the work and I don't have to think; in fact, were I to think, it would stop the flow. It's like a dam in the brain that bursts"

Edna O'Brien, Novelist

"The greatest crime in a Shakespeare play is to murder the king"

Alex Cox, Director

"Shakespeare, who is probably the greatest writer and poet of the English language, lived in a time that was politically very conservative, and it's reflected in his writings"

Alex Cox, Director

"Everybody gets a little dose of Shakespeare. He's the greatest playwright in the English language, but his politics are fairly square"

Alex Cox, Director

"Choose an author as you choose a friend"

Arthur Helps, Historian

"This means keeping many trails open at once, inevitably requiring a fairly 'parallel' plot. This plot should be discovered rather than announced, so show, don't tell"

Graham Nelson, Mathematician

"The 'interactive fiction' format hasn't changed in any fundamental way since the early 1970s, in the same way that the format of the novel hasn't since 1700"

Graham Nelson, Mathematician

"I like to employ a form of repetition, in which the same elements recur but in different and unexpected ways. Rather than being discarded as soon as they are understood or passed over"

Graham Nelson, Mathematician

"A deliberate choice on my part was for the player to continue to find new possibilities in the early Attic rooms far into the game. I think this builds atmosphere, though it means there's no neat division of the prologue from the middle game"

Graham Nelson, Mathematician

Roland Joffe, Director

"Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary"

Francoise Sagan, Playwright

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