Arts, Media & Entertainment: Writing Quotes

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"Look, obviously that was - created quite a firestorm, but Newsweek editors have made clear that this was a situation where, you know, a solid, well-placed source provided some information"

Michael Isikoff, Journalist

"And it is a very beautiful idea, and possibly true, that a common man from Stratford with a common education was able to write these plays"

Mark Rylance, Actor

"Writing, basically breaks down to relationships between people, and that is what you write about"

Leon Uris, Writer

"I essentially write for myself"

Leon Uris, Writer

"English, of course, is your major tool, but it is not nearly so important as other aspects of writing, for example, you have to have some natural ability, you can't buy it, no one puts it there, you're born with it"

Leon Uris, Writer

"By the time I would have graduated, at 22, I was a writer and featured performer on Saturday Night Live"

Sarah Silverman, Comedian

"I want to go to college. I'm going to take four years off. I don't want to miss that. I want to be a writer. I think that'd be awesome!"

Kristen Stewart, Actress

"Writing requires a great deal of skill, just like painting does. People don't want to learn those skills"

John Milius, Director

"I've always been able to survive by writing, though"

John Milius, Director

"I think fiction is a very serious thing, that while it is fiction, it is also a revelation of truth, or facts"

John McGahern, Writer

"I like to get paid for doing basic research, so it's pleasant to write some nonfiction about it"

Bruce Sterling, Writer

"The silence was part of the story I wanted to tell"

Joyce Maynard, Writer

"What I look for in any character, good or bad, is whether I can hear him speak. If I can imagine him that clearly, then I can write about him"

Thomas Perry, Musician

"The characters you refer to as predatory and unsavory are useful. They're the ones who make a novel into a thriller. They're active, and most of the common virtues, the signs of a good person, are not"

Thomas Perry, Musician

"I don't consciously do anything to maintain a unique voice"

Thomas Perry, Musician

"Well, in features, and in writing especially, it's often the style of the writer comes in"

Kurt Loder, Journalist

"I've had three novels published, and I was working a little bit in theater in Ireland. I wrote one film script just to see what it would turn out like"

Neil Jordan, Director

"I never sit down and write. I just sorta let things form in my brain"

Mose Allison, Musician

"Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... Anything goes"

Cole Porter, Composer

"My job is to help the functioning of the story, not to draw attention to myself, but to make my characters function within the story, to work for the benefit of the story, to make the whole thing work"

Jeffrey Jones, Actor

"I think it's also the case that I'm not as widely travelled, or as well-educated in history, as most of the other novelists I meet: so I have to write about my own country, at the present time, because it's more or less all I know about!"

Jonathan Coe, Novelist

"But at the same time, I have trouble keeping things out of books, which is why I don't write short stories, because they turn into novels"

Jonathan Coe, Novelist

"As I said, I had no publisher for What a Carve Up! while I was writing it, so all we had to live off was my wife's money and little bits I was picking up for journalism"

Jonathan Coe, Novelist

"Whatever I'm reading at the moment seems to influence whatever I'm writing"

John Sladek, Author

"This is mainly because I spend a lot of time writing and so don't have much time to read; I hate to waste that time reading what may turn out to be junk food for the mind, when there's so much real writing to be read"

John Sladek, Author

"I started writing, or rather, thinking, stories as a child, and at that time the reason was very clear!"

John Sladek, Author

"Anything can happen in SF. And the fact that nothing ever does happen in SF is only due to the poverty of our imaginations, we who write it or edit it or read it. But SF can in principle deal with anything"

John Sladek, Author

"I think some of the best reporters are the ones who can really illustrate the differences between societies, at the same time trying to connect the fact that there are a lot of shared values in addition to those differences"

John Pomfret

"I don't begin a novel or a screenplay until I know the ending. And I don't mean only that I have to know what happens. I mean that I have to hear the actual sentences. I have to know what atmosphere the words convey"

John Irving, Novelist

"Storylines are how characters create the plots involved in their stories"

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Writer

"We're newspaper junkies; I can't imagine life without a newspaper"

Sally Quinn, Journalist

"I didn't have to say it. I just had to write it. It was painful enough"

Robert B. Parker, Writer

"I wouldn't describe that "position" as "parasitic." I'd describe that experience as "edifying." I don't merely write from a critical intellectual distance. I actually live around here"

Bruce Sterling, Writer

"I don't stare at a sheet of paper and try to think of a good word to use. I try to see where the story should go"

Brad Paisley, Musician

"My major aim in writing is to set out flags and issue wake-up calls"

James Broughton, Director

"I often start writing in order to excite an expansive emotion"

James Broughton, Director

"After the magical act accomplished by Joyce with Ulysses, perhaps we are getting away from it"

Raymond Queneau, Poet

"I have two ideas for novels at the moment, neither of them all that conventional, but I'm not ready to choose between them yet, let alone settle down to the process of writing"

Jonathan Coe, Novelist

"I found some time ago that I have to be careful, while working on a novel, what I read"

John Sladek, Author

"I would fix other people's lines if they asked me on occasion. The hard part of writing is the architecture of it, getting the story and structuring it. Not the tweaking of lines"

William Devane, Actor

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