Arts, Media & Entertainment: Writing Quotes

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"Read. Read. Read. Just don't read one type of book. Read different books by various authors so that you develop different styles"

R. L. Stine, Writer

"In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better"

Doris Lessing, Writer

"All good Literature rests primarily on insight"

George Henry Lewes, Philosopher

"Personal experience is the basis of all real Literature"

George Henry Lewes, Philosopher

"Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours"

Salman Rushdie, Novelist

"So when I write characters and situations and relationships, I try to sort of utilize what I know about the world, limited as it is, and what I hear from my friends and see with my relatives"

Charlie Kaufman, Screenwriter

"The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it"

Thomas Wolfe, Novelist

"The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location"

Flannery O'Connor, Author

"I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always cliches, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it provides a more 'productive' literary raw material, but because that is the way we humans really are"

Jose Saramago, Writer

"I do not just write, I write what I am. If there is a secret, perhaps that is it"

Jose Saramago, Writer

"I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living"

Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Writer

"Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things"

Al Gore, Vice President

"There was always the consolation that if I didn't like what I wrote I could throw it away or burn it"

Carl Sandburg, Poet

"The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other well"

Elias Canetti, Author

"All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual"

Milan Kundera, Writer

"The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine"

Stephen Leacock, Economist

"The easiest thing to do on earth is not write"

William Goldman, Novelist

"The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past, where time hovers ghostlike"

Ralph Ellison, Author

"I would recommend the short story form, which is a lot harder to write since you have to be so careful with words, until there is plenty of time to doodle through a novel"

Anne McCaffrey, Author

"The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written"

Elizabeth Bowen, Novelist

"Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living"

Harold Pinter, Playwright

"For me, life is writing and I can do it anywhere. It doesn't matter where I am. I listen. I write. I live"

Maynard James Keenan, Musician

"The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness"

V. S. Naipaul, Novelist

"One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria"

V. S. Naipaul, Novelist

"Journalists should think of themselves as outside the Establishment, and owners can't be too worried about what they're told at their country clubs"

Rupert Murdoch, Publisher

"One of the best things about folklore and fairy tales is that the best fantasy is what you find right around the corner, in this world. That's where the old stuff came from"

Terri Windling, Artist

"Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least weighty is the choice of the moment at which to begin his novel"

Vita Sackville-West, Novelist

"Call me the author"

Joan Didion, Author

"Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead"

Gene Fowler, Journalist

"The printed page conveys information and commitment, and requires active involvement. Television conveys emotion and experience, and it's very limited in what it can do logically. It's an existential experience - there and then gone"

Bill Moyers, Journalist

"Shirley Valentine is a beautiful character and so well written. What Shirley speaks and thinks is so logical"

Loretta Swit, Actress

"I think plays, like books, are endemic. They grow out of the soil of the writer and the place he's writing about. I think you just can't move them about, you know"

Peter Shaffer, Playwright

"In science fiction, you can also test out your own realities"

Theodore Sturgeon, Writer

"Here's the point to be made - there are no synonyms. There are no two words that mean exactly the same thing"

Theodore Sturgeon, Writer

"Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing"

Bernard Malamud, Novelist

"Create a world in which these things do or do not exist, or in which they are extended in some way. Test reality against this fiction. The reader will recognize the world that you're talking about, even though it may be another one altogether"

Theodore Sturgeon, Writer

"It really wasn't until I was in college when I began to write more and more, and I realized I was scheduling my entire life around my writing"

Rita Dove, Poet

"Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers"

Logan P. Smith, Writer

"And I think that being able to make people laugh and write a book that's funny makes the information go down a lot easier and it makes it a lot more fun to read, easier to understand, and often stronger. So there's all kinds of advantages to it"

Al Franken, Comedian

"If I allow journalists to describe a collection and they make mistakes, I'm upset, because the retractions are never noticed"

Calvin Klein, Designer

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