Writing Quotes - Page 1075

I don't read or write SF for cutting edge ideas; I read and write it for the storytelling, and every story is new. So have I brought anything new to it? Only in so far as no-one before has written about the characters I've invented in their particular situation.

If our writing is worth anything at all, then we have to put ourselves into it.

For some reason, I write about crash-landed spaceships quite a lot and my wife is sick of hearing of hearing my ideas for new tales about them.

There's no one on the island telling them they're not good enough, so they just go ahead and sing and paint and write.

Don't forget that Mozart worked on commission. He almost always would write something if he knew exactly who was paying for it and where it would be performed. So you can't really separate the creation of genius from the appreciation of it.

Point of view is present in anything I write, but I really try to let the subject and facts speak for themselves.

So for everything I do, I'm very clear about what I'm doing, and I tell people what it's about. They get a sense of what I'm thinking. I don't let people think I'm going to write something in praise in the meatpacking industry, and then they read it and it's actually attacking the meatpacking industry.

A typical workday for me is getting up at about 5:00, 5:15 in the morning, getting some coffee or tea as quickly as possible, and then getting to my desk. And ideally, I'll start writing around 5:30, 5:45, and I'll write for three, four hours, and then I'll take a break, and read over what I write. Maybe about lunchtime, I'll go exercise or get out into the day. Then I'll either read over what I wrote the day before and quit work around 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon and spend some time with my kids.

Years ago when I got stuck, I'd start twirling my hair. That's not possible anymore. I can't prove the relationship between writing and hair loss, but I think I pulled out a fair amount trying to work on certain sentences.

Complexity control is the central problem of writing software in the real world

Like italics and hyphens, quotation marks are to be used as sparingly as possible. They should light the way, not darken it.

The three main leads [in Townies] were Lauren [ Graham] and Jenna [Elfman] and Molly [Ringwald], and then Ron Livingston was on it as well. There was a lot of people to write funny stuff for.

[Townies] was a huge cast. It was a bit ungainly, I think with 12 regular characters they had to keep writing for.

The thing you realize pretty quickly, though, is that being in front of an audience whose job it is to laugh is a big pressure if the writing is not hilarious.

A key to a long, productive writing life is finding ways to support that life, emotionally and existentially.

You honor your writing space by recovering, if you are an addict. You honor your writing space by becoming an anxiety expert, a real pro at mindfulness and personal calming. You honor your writing space by affirming that you matter, that your writing life matters, and that your current writing project matters. You honor your writing space by entering it with this mantra: “I am ready to work.” You enter, grow quiet, and vanish into your writing.

When you're writing TV or movies your vernacular is time, it's all based on rhythms, a character takes a beat or two characters have a moment, like everything is about time. And when you're writing a comic, everything is about space. It's how many panels to put on a page, when should you do a full page splash, what is the detail that you see in any particular image.

The testimony of every scientist is that the frontiers that are opening out ahead of us now are far wider and more spectacular than any frontier of America in the past. Our horizons are not closed. We are going to write a greater development in America than has ever been conceived.

I'm just trying to write a good story, strictly from imagination. People just think it's random, they don't see the rewriting, phrasing of characters, choosing the words, bringing the world to light in which the characters live in. That creates an illusion that this is real.

I never think in terms of target audience. I try to write what makes me laugh, so I'm the target audience. I guess I just hope there's another person in America like me.

When I was 23 I started writing for I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again and was paid three guineas for every minute's airtime.

When we graduated [ from Cambridge], we were grabbed right into television. I was grabbed straight into the practice of writing comedy. It was all writing and performing. You wrote something in order for you to perform it.

You could write a joke in the pub at lunchtime and watch it performed on television that evening.

Monty Python paid me £20,000 to write, direct and assemble them - the cheapskates! I told them I'd never earned less in a year since leaving Cambridge. The first show sold out in 43 seconds and we ended up performing ten in total. We had no idea there would be such demand.

There's no gap between the writer and the performer, which is what I think makes [Monty] Python unique. Five or six people who write Python and five or six who act it. That's what makes it unique.