Arts, Media & Entertainment: Writing Quotes

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"Well, I suppose I'm interested in ways of storytelling and in stories that are about storytelling"

Neil Jordan, Director

"I can't do a film if I don't start with the writing"

Neil Jordan, Director

"So writing is a very, very difficult position to obtain... and retain"

Leon Uris, Writer

"I enjoy writing, sometimes; I think that most writers will tell you about the agony of writing more than the joy of writing, but writing is what I was meant to do"

Leon Uris, Writer

"It seems to me that you would have to write a novel on a very small, intimate scale for it not to become political"

Jonathan Coe, Novelist

"I usually like whatever I've recently finished best"

John Sladek, Author

"I have a kind of standard explanation why, which goes like this: Science fiction is one way of making sense out of a senseless world"

John Sladek, Author

"One of the problems that we have as American journalists is that we bring the American cultural baggage with us and we plop it down and it follows us around and that's just a fact of life"

John Pomfret

"In some ways, the domestic reporting is a lot easier because Americans will talk to you about anything"

John Pomfret

"Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties"

John Irving, Novelist

"When I was still in prep school - 14, 15 - I started keeping notebooks, journals. I started writing, almost like landscape drawing or life drawing. I never kept a diary, I never wrote about my day and what happened to me, but I described things"

John Irving, Novelist

"I had been a student in Vienna, and one of the neat little things I had found out was about that zoo. It was a good debut novel for me to have published. I was 26 or 27 when it was published. I already had a kid and would soon have a second"

John Irving, Novelist

"Although I like the work I've done in the past, I like what I'm writing now even more"

Cynthia Weil, Musician

"Writers are too neurotic to ever be happy"

Connie Willis, Writer

"I began as a boy with artistic talent... As a visual artist... I thought that was what I'd become and in my late teens drifted into reading serious literature"

Russell Banks, Author

"I find that screenwriting is at best, kind of a hackwork in some ways"

John Milius, Director

"I've never written anything that hasn't been in my mind for a long time - seven or eight years"

John McGahern, Writer

"And there are people who want to be writers because they love to write. And they care"

Russell Banks, Author

"Although I still occasionally paint and draw, my life has now been shaped by my writing"

Russell Banks, Author

"I should think just about every young writer - which I was at the time - would be influenced by HPL. As an American writer of weird fiction, he was at the top of the class"

Brian Lumley, Writer

"No, you're either born a writer, a storyteller, or you're not"

John Milius, Director

"I think that each of us inhabits a private world that others cannot see. The only difference between the writer and the reader is that the writer is able to dramatise that private world"

John McGahern, Writer

"I think technique can be taught but I think the only way to learn to write is to read, and I see writing and reading as completely related. One almost couldn't exist without the other"

John McGahern, Writer

"All of my books now come from readers' ideas"

Ann Rule, Writer

"The society Shakespeare knew was heading for tremendous change, and he seems to have recognized that and written about it in a coded way. I understand those codes, I think"

Vanessa Redgrave, Actress

"Yes, in my books I do edit myself to keep from becoming the Village Explainer"

Thomas Perry, Musician

"Shakespeare lets us see real people undergoing real processes, with real feelings"

Vanessa Redgrave, Actress

"I started writing while I was a little boy. Maybe it's because I was reading a lot of books I admired and thought that I would like to write something like that someday. Also, my love for good writing pushed me"

Naguib Mahfouz, Novelist

"Words, yes, formulating things, creating something from your heart, it is something very necessary, yes"

Sophie Marceau, Actress

"You know, sometimes I get moments of inspiration when I'm writing something and then the task seems so daunting that it just kind of scares me away"

Adam Pascal, Actor

"A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts"

William Strunk, Jr., Writer

"When I write a book, I'm making it the best book I can"

Thomas Perry, Musician

"If I don't have a project going, I sit down and begin to write something - a character sketch, a monologue, a description of some sight, or even just a list of ideas"

Thomas Perry, Musician

"I had been writing fiction since I was in eighth grade because I loved it"

Thomas Perry, Musician

"All writers are mimics, and I'm not interested in picking up somebody else's style or voice"

Thomas Perry, Musician

"I'm talking to you and it's basically a direct communication, whereas if I'm writing a letter to you and you read the letter, there are like 12 extra deconstruction and reconstruction steps in the communication"

Kevin J. Anderson, Author

"Anderson's muckraking is one of debatable ends constantly used to justify questionable works"

Thomas Griffith, Editor

"For years, I've pushed the idea of a column compilation book mainly because it would be easy - I could just staple 'em all together. But publishers have been resistent, feeling the material dates"

Michael Musto, Writer

"What I like about non-fiction is that it covers such a huge territory. The best non-fiction is also creative"

Tracy Kidder, Author

"It's really about living in your head... just looking out at the world, then going back into your head and tossing around a lot of ideas and coming out with something interesting to say"

Lucinda Williams, Musician

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