Arts, Media & Entertainment: Writing Quotes

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"I wrote two plotted books, got some of the fundamentals of storytelling down, then... It's sort of like taking the training wheels off, trying to write a book that's fun in the same way without relying on quite such mechanical or external beats"

Jonathan Franzen, Novelist

"I think I got spoiled and that writing a short story and getting it published, or writing a novel and getting it published, you pretty much get to do the first, second and third draft yourself without a whole lot of interference"

John Sayles, Director

"I remember being out here at the Sunset Marquis, and whoever knocked on the door, I would take that picture that I was writing and I would put that in the typewriter, so when I had the meeting, they would say: 'Oh, you're working on it right now?'"

John Sayles, Director

"I am still working on patter and presentation"

Paul Daniels, Entertainer

"We used the Western style to express our own themes and stories. But don't forget that our heritage includes The Thousand and One Nights"

Naguib Mahfouz, Novelist

"The Arab world also won the Nobel with me. I believe that international doors have opened, and that from now on, literate people will consider Arab literature also. We deserve that recognition"

Naguib Mahfouz, Novelist

"I was reading a lot of books I admired, and thought that I would like to write something like that someday"

Naguib Mahfouz, Novelist

"An allegory is not meant to be taken literally. There is a great lack of comprehension on the part of some readers"

Naguib Mahfouz, Novelist

"When they do bring on new people, it's good for the show. It's like getting a new toy. The writers enjoy it because it's a whole new character that they can write for, one that they aren't used to writing for. They can try different things!"

Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Actor

"Very few editors worry about heresy - their goals are much too commercial, thank goodness"

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Writer

"But if you really love to write and you really love to tell stories and you really love to draw, you just have to keep doing it no matter what anybody says"

William Joyce, Author

"We like writing with each other; it's fun"

Shawn Wayans, Actor

"The trite answer is that everything is true but none of it happened. It is emotionally true, but the events, the plotting, the narrative, isn't true of my life, though I've experienced most of the emotions experienced by the characters in the play"

Patrick Marber, Writer

"A literary journal is intended to connect writer with reader; the role of the editor is to mediate"

John Barton, Poet

"I think finally good writing gets out there, and people like it, and bad writing doesn't. Well, no. Bad writing does get out there 'cause some people like it"

Robert B. Parker, Writer

"I have reached the point where I know that as long as I sit down to write, the ideas will come. What they will be, I don't know"

Robert B. Parker, Writer

"I never fantasized or invented a thing, not one thing. I knew every single thing I ever wrote about"

Marguerite Young, Author

"I don't believe there can be a poetic novel without political consciousness. I have a strong political conscience"

Marguerite Young, Author

"I believe that all my work explores the human desire or obsession for utopias, and the structure of all my works is the search for utopias lost and rediscovered"

Marguerite Young, Author

"All my writing is about the recognition that there is no single reality. But the beauty of it is that you nevertheless go on, walking towards utopia, which may not exist, on a bridge which might end before you reach the other side"

Marguerite Young, Author

"I would never write realistic prose. I don't like people who try to write in a poetic style, but in the course of their book abandon it for realism, and weave back and forth like drunkards between the surreal and the real"

Marguerite Young, Author

"If I am communicating to my readers exactly what the White House believes on any certain issue, that's reporting to them an unvarnished, unfiltered version of what they - the Administration - believe"

Jeff Gannon, Journalist

"A people's literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can;"

Edith Hamilton, Writer

"I never thought of myself as either a woman or a man. I thought of myself as a person who was born to a writer, who was doomed to be a writer"

Marguerite Young, Author

"A good writer cannot avoid having social consciousness. I don't mean this about small pieces of writing, but about a big book. If it's a big book, there has to be more than one undertow"

Marguerite Young, Author

"In hard-core science fiction, in which characters are responding to a change in environment, caused by nature or the universe or technology, what readers want to see is how people cope, and so the character are present to cope, or fail to cope"

James Gunn, Writer

"I still write the same way and have the same perspective"

Kenneth Edmonds, Musician

"I don't exist without writing"

Jewel Kilcher, Musician

"Our principal writers have nearly all been fortunate in escaping regular education"

Hugh MacDiarmid, Poet

"For after my marriage I had made various attempts to write fiction. They were clearly failures"

Mary A. Ward

"That certainly is one approach to take. My own is to acknowledge the inner child and try to work with my first fascination with science fiction. I have tried to build on its idea content and narrative drive rather than to discard them!"

James Gunn, Writer

"The real pleasure in writing this, for me, was discovering how little you need"

Jonathan Franzen, Novelist

"I certainly grew up seeing more movies and television than I read books, but when it came time to do the thing itself, you don't have to hire a lot of people to sit down and write a book, so that was the story-telling medium that was available to me"

John Sayles, Director

"There would be nights when I would wake up and couldn't get back to sleep. So I would go downstairs and write. The staff had a pool going on how many pages of typing I would bring in here in the morning"

Harold H. Greene, Judge

"So, I do not consider myself a chronicler of my fatherland, or even a chronicler of Havana"

Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Novelist

"I know that many writers have had to write under censorship and yet produced good novels; for instance, Cervantes wrote Don Quixote under Catholic censorship"

Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Novelist

"I describe my works as books, but my publishers in Spain, in the United States, and elsewhere insist on calling them novels"

Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Novelist

"For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page"

Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Novelist

"But even gold is not everything: and only a fanatic, and a rather foolish fanatic, would say that this style of fiction summed up and exhausted all the good that fiction could give and do"

George Saintsbury, Writer

"I really did try to write it so that an educated public that cares about issues like this doesn't have to be a lawyer and can read it and understand it"

Floyd Abrams, Lawyer

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