Arts, Media & Entertainment: Writing Quotes

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"I have come to understand and appreciate writers much more recently since I started working on a book last fall. Before that, I thought golf writers got up every morning, played a round of golf, had lunch, showed up for our last three holes and then went to dinner"

Phil Mickelson, Athlete

"In Endless Quest books, you start the plot, and the character has to make choices. Then you have to write one choice over here, one choice over there. The author might get one or two choices out"

Margaret Weis, Writer

"All the characters and plots were predetermined. Games make bad plots"

Margaret Weis, Writer

"That's what it is every time you walk into the room to write with someone new. It's like, oh God, I have to take my clothes off 'my creative clothes' and let them see all of my flaws"

Cynthia Weil, Musician

"That first writing session, what Dan Hill calls a creative blind date, is always a real challenge, and you bring that back to your partner when you return to writing with them"

Cynthia Weil, Musician

"I prefer to imagine that my wife, a few friends, and occasionally my mom are the only ones who read what I do, though I realize that this is somewhat unrealistic"

Chris Ware, Artist

"I don't view myself as a political leftie. I view myself as a storyteller who is fair to both sides"

Tim Robbins, Actor

"It's important, I think, for a writer of fiction to maintain an awareness of the pace and shape of the book as he's writing it. That is, he should be making an object, not chattering"

Thomas Perry, Musician

"I do like to explore evil characters in my books"

Thomas Perry, Musician

"I do hope to bring Jane Whitefield back before too long"

Thomas Perry, Musician

"I'm a good storyteller"

Sophie Marceau, Actress

"I'll know when the ideas aren't fresh anymore. And I'll know when writing doesn't give me a thrill anymore"

Brian Lumley, Writer

"You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan"

Ian Mcewan, Author

"It is not the first duty of the novelist to provide blueprints for insurrection, or uplifting tales of successful resistance for the benefit of the opposition. The naming of what is there is what is important"

Ian Mcewan, Author

"We're writing a book together. She just finished one. Did you read it? Among the Porcupines?"

Walter Matthau, Actor

"In ordinary detective novels you never see the consequences of what happens in a story in the next book. That you do in mine"

Stieg Larsson, Author

"I started to write in 2001. I wrote the books for the fun of it. It was an old idea I had had since the nineties"

Stieg Larsson, Author

"It is important to tell good stories. You can tell stories even if they are not huge, epic, and wonderful. You can still take the responsibility for being a scribe of your tribe"

Ajay Naidu, Actor

"There is a shadow on every page"

Eugene Ormandy, Musician

"Writing and telling are almost the same, the way I do it"

Daniel Pinkwater, Author

"Today I began the novel that I determined to be great"

Zane Grey, Author

"I did not have one bad spell during writing - an unprecedented record"

Zane Grey, Author

"You have to work with what you are given, even in Shakespeare. We have our form and it is important that we free ourselves through it"

Ajay Naidu, Actor

"I want to present interesting stories that don't qualify themselves just by virtue of their ethnographic type"

Ajay Naidu, Actor

"But those two plays left me on fresh terms with language. I didn't always have to speak in my own voice"

James Merrill, Poet

"Stephen King writes a lot of things that are really charming and quirky, and that are more ironic than horror"

William H. Macy, Actor

"I'm really proud of the writing on Door to Door, and I think that's the Emmy that meant the most - the writing"

William H. Macy, Actor

"I don't know if you've ever tried writing a Doctor Who story, but it's a lot more difficult than it initially appears, especially if you've got more than one assistant"

Sarah Sutton, Actress

"That's the heart of it: My shows were not that controversial with the American people. They were controversial with the people who think for the American people"

Norman Lear, Producer

"But it also became the experience, or was the experience, of the writers who were attracted to this kind of humor. They're all men or women who come from the same kind of experience in their own lives"

Norman Lear, Producer

"Some critics of my work took the view that a satirist should defer to the finer feelings of his readers and respect widely held beliefs"

David Low, Cartoonist

"I imagine a child. That child is me. I can reconstruct and vividly remember portions of my own childhood. I can see, taste, smell, feel, and hear them. Then what I do is not write about that kid or about his world, but start to think of a book that would have pleased him"

Daniel Pinkwater, Author

"Well, I am not 100 percent sure of the definition of polemic, but it wasn't meant to convince anybody of anything"

Art Spiegelman, Artist

"In doing everything, from coming up with the ideas and putting them on paper till doing the final edits, you are always thinking the next three steps, you're always thinking what next, what next, what next?"

Andrew McCarthy, Actor

"My training was that you fill in the canvas where it needs colour and polishing. You start with the words on the first night and keep adding bits of business"

Ron Moody, Actor

"A lot of my reading over the next few months will be the works of Hans Christian Andersen - I have been appointed an ambassador for the bicentenary celebrations of his birth next year"

Roger Moore, Actor

"If I could go back in time and tell my younger self that eventually, that I'd become very successful writing Dune books after Frank Herbert's death, I would have laughed myself silly, I think, at how strange that prospect would be"

Kevin J. Anderson, Author

"I've had the same, full-time assistant and typist for eight or nine years now. She's read everything I've written, she types everything and does a good job, translates it and makes comments"

Kevin J. Anderson, Author

"I got to spend all of my time every day at work reading and editing papers about cutting-edge technical research and getting paid for it. Then I'd go home at night and turn what I learned into science fiction stories"

Kevin J. Anderson, Author

"I wrote for nearly six hours. When I stopped, the dark mood, as if by magic, had folded its cloak and gone away"

Zane Grey, Author

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