Writing Quotes - Page 1090

When a play enters my consciousness, is already a fairly well-developed fetus. I don't put down a word until the play seems ready to be written.

Naturally, no writer who's any good at all would sit down and put a sheet of paper in a typewriter and start typing a play unless he knew what he was writing about.

Writing should be useful. If it can’t instruct people a little bit more about the responsibilities of consciousness, there’s no point in doing it.

It's the function of a playwright to write. Some playwrights write a large number of plays, some write a small number.

There's always the danger that there are so damn many things that a playwright can examine in this society of ours - things that have less to do with his artistic work than have to do with the critical and aesthetic environment - that perhaps he does have to worry about whether or not he is writing too fast. But then also, perhaps he should worry about getting as many plays on as possible before the inevitable ax falls.

I don't set out to write a play a year. Sometimes I've written two plays a year. There was a period of a year and half when I only wrote half a play. If it depresses some critics that I seem prolific, well, that's their problem as much as mine.

Writing has got to be an act of discovery....I write to find out what I'm thinking about.

Well, when you write about people of a certain age ... we are in a postsexual situation. If I write about younger people then I write sexually, because their drive is sexual. It depends upon the circumstances.

I'm back in fashion again for a while now. But I imagine that three or four years from now I'll be out again. And in another fifteen years I'll be back. If you try to write to stay in fashion, if you try to write to be the critics' darling, you become an employee.

In order to write a book, it is necessary to sit down (or stand up) and write. Therein lies the difficulty.

I would prefer to write about everything; what else is there? But one must be selective.

In writing, fidelity to fact leads eventually to the poetry of truth.

Good writing can be defined as having something to say and saying it well. When one has nothing to say, one should remain silent. Silence is always beautiful at such times.

The author: an imaginary person who writes real books.

So I write mainly for the fun of it, the hell of it, the duty of it. I enjoy writing and will probably be a scribbler on my dying day, sprawled on some stony trail halfway between two dry waterholes.

I always write with my .357 magnum handy. Why? Well, you never know when God may try to interfere.

Poor Dimitri Shostakovich: In the Soviet Union, he was condemned as being too radical; in the West, for being too conservative. He could please no one but the musical public. He revenged himself on both by writing a short piece called 'March of the Soviet Police.'

But it is a writer's duty to write and speak and record the truth, always the truth, no matter whom may be offended.

When a writer has done the best that he can do, he should then withdraw from the book-writing business and take up an honest trade like shoe repair, cattle stealing, or screwworm management.

If there is one 'scientific' discovery I am proud of, it is the discovery of the habit of writing without publication in mind.

That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.

Writing is the product of a deeply disturbed psyche, and by no means therapeutic.

Obviously all writers, all artists, have their own internal critics; as they write they are being self-critical.

I think that literature quite often emerges from areas where there has been a lack of articulation, like women's writing.

writers of novels are so busy being solitary that they haven't time to meet one another. But then, a writer learns nothing from a writer, conversationally. If a writer has anything witty, profound or quotable to say he doesn't say it. He's no fool. He writes it.