Arts, Media & Entertainment: Writing Quotes

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"I know there are reporters who ridicule pundits"

Daniel Okrent, Editor

"My interest in secret societies is the product of many experiences, some I can discuss, others I cannot"

Dan Brown, Author

"The essays are very solipsistic and self-absorbed, I'm totally conscious of that. To me, book writing is fun, and I basically just write about things that are entertaining to myself"

Chuck Klosterman, Critic

"I was fortunate that I was at newspapers for eight years, where I wrote at least five or six stories every week. You get used to interviewing lots of different people about a lot of different things. And they aren't things you know about until you do the story"

Chuck Klosterman, Critic

"Book writing is a little different because, in my case, my editor is a year younger than me and basically has the same sensibility as me"

Chuck Klosterman, Critic

"As for the historical inspirations I drew on in writing The Snow Queen, I suppose I would call them more cross-cultural inspirations, though they frequently involve past societies as well as present day ones"

Joan D. Vinge, Author

"It is always pleasant to learn that someone takes an interest in a work which one enjoyed writing"

James Schuyler, Poet

"I've always written about things that cause me to feel something"

Iris DeMent, Musician

"There are numerous cases of that, where one of our writers discovers another writer whom he likes, and we then take that book on. So it's a very close relationship. We can do that because we're so small"

James Laughlin, Poet

"I try to write in plain brown blocks of American speech, but occasionally set in an ancient word or a strange word, just to startle the reader a little bit, and to break up the monotony of the plain American cadence"

James Laughlin, Poet

"In my book, I was trying to get into my own soul"

Claire Bloom, Actress

"But the French writers always had more originality and independence than others, and that regulator, which elsewhere was religion, long since ceased to exist for them"

Henryk Sienkiewicz, Novelist

"Writing children's books gives a writer a very strong sense of narrative drive"

Helen Dunmore, Poet

"The language has got to be fully alive - I can't bear dull, flaccid writing myself and I don't see why any reader should put up with it"

Helen Dunmore, Poet

"I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like child stringing beads in kindergarten, - happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another"

Brenda Ueland, Writer

"If you're doing an interview, you need conversational tension. After you talk to them, you're not going to have a relationship with them, they're not going to like you, they're not going to be your friend"

Chuck Klosterman, Critic

"If you write a story based on a real person, you're trapped by the details of the real person and his life. It gets in the way of writing your own story"

Caroline B. Cooney, Writer

"It's a character I've created. Actually, that's pretty much the opposite of me, off a farm in the Midwest"

Douglas Wilson, Entertainer

"Agents will read unpublished work because they might make money, and that's their job. It isn't mine"

Bernard Cornwell, Novelist

"I think it's an area that one writes from that is curious because it is not a clearly defined partisan one"

Breyten Breytenbach, Writer

"As a rule, it usually takes three or four readings for me to be interested in a script, and if I'm interested I'll read it three or four times before I make a strong decision"

Chris Cooper, Actor

"Sketches have characters, exits, entrances, and are vastly different"

David Cross, Comedian

"I'll think of the idea and then I'll write something down, then within that there will be a joke or two which is the original thing which I thought was funny"

David Cross, Comedian

"In my plays I want to look at life - at the commonplace of existence-as if we had just turned a corner and run into it for the first time"

Christopher Fry, Playwright

"One book at a time... though I'm usually doing the research for others while I'm writing, but that sort of research is fairly desultory and I like to stick to the book being written - and writing a book concentrates the mind so the research is more productive"

Bernard Cornwell, Novelist

"That's all true, but there was something else going on for me as a kid, something about my gender identity that I haven't figured out yet. And that's one of the things I'm hoping to dissect and investigate in this memoir project"

Alison Bechdel, Cartoonist

"For some reason writing and drawing are very separate processes for me"

Alison Bechdel, Cartoonist

"No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written"

Alice Hoffman, Author

"I also like the whole idea of fairy tales and folk tales being a woman's domain, considered a lesser domain at the time they were told"

Alice Hoffman, Author

"You have certain writing tools, but generally creating something from nothing makes one quite mad, and Cynthia and I are quite mad, you know"

Barry Mann, Musician

"The writer who can't do his job looks to his editor to do it for him, though he won't dream of sharing his royalties with that editor"

Alfred A. Knopf, Publisher

"They place great stress on the clarity of our language for expressing nuances and showing subtleties"

Bernard Pivot, Journalist

"I remember thinking during those times that I wanted to write in a way where there are no rules"

Alanis Morissette, Musician

"It came about as follows: Over the years when I was involved in Dianetics, I wrote the beginnings of many stories. I would get an idea, and then write the beginning, and then never touch it again"

A. E. van Vogt, Author

"I had casually rented an apartment that cost $75 a month because I expected my writing to pay my way"

A. E. van Vogt, Author

"I figure that that has a ten year cycle. At the end of that ten years, I began to get worried that I would run into what is known as the writer's block, the feeling of not being able to do these things"

A. E. van Vogt, Author

"I am now working on the second WWI story and find the challenge marvelous"

Anne Perry, Novelist

"I've been a screenwriter for twenty-five years. Every one of my books have been optioned for movies, and I have written a few of those screenplays"

Alice Hoffman, Author

"I did go there later, but I hadn't been there before I wrote the book. Sometimes I feel like the imagined can feel more real than the real?"

Alice Hoffman, Author

"I always felt and still feel that fairy tales have an emotional truth that is so deep that there are few things that really rival them"

Alice Hoffman, Author

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