Writing Quotes - Page 1116

Persons who reach the higher rungs in business management, selling, engineering, religious work, writing, acting, and in every other pursuit get there by following conscientiously and continuously a plan for self-development and growth.

Fine writing, according to Mr. Addison, consists of sentiments which are natural without being obvious.

There is an argument for believing that the entire process of writing a piece of fiction is simply a thinly-controlled and highly-internalised nervous breakdown designed, with a bit of luck, to produce something worthwhile at the end.

As you write plays, you discover what you believe. And until you know what you believe, you can't write a play.

I fell into writing plays by accident. But the reason I write plays is that it's the only thing I'm any good at.

I'm trying to write something in which you know that it's all about sex but you never see any.

The actual business of writing dialogue is not thought of as a craft.

What sustains me is to be with my family and to write.

Even though I may not intend it when I set out to write the book, these places just emerge as major players in what I'm doing, almost as if they are insisting on it.

Hemingway said the only way to write about a place is to leave it.

Writers shouldn’t underestimate the difficulty of what they’re doing, and they should treat it with great seriousness. You’re doing something that really matters, you’re telling stories that have an impact on other people and on the culture. You should tell the best stories you can possibly tell and put everything you’ve got into it.

The best advice on writing I've ever received is to take it seriously, because to do it well is all-consuming.

The danger of these collaborations across disciplines is in having too strict of a division of labor - in my case, of getting stuck doing the music. When I make an album, I write music, I write lyrics, I come up with the visual design, etc. I get to do all of that stuff.

I don't write poetry for the page because my inclination in that area is satisfied by songwriting. "Ornamental Hermit" was a comparatively effortless song to write, which is rare for me.

In terms of writing, I think something happens to you, and you think, "Oh I'm going to write about that. That's an emotional event." But obviously, if you keep going, and it's something you do with regularity, you've got to find other ways to write.

Early in my career I was much more confident in the almost omniscient powers of a reporter, because you could find anything out and then write the definitive piece about it. And as I got older, I got much more humble about trying to learn everything, with what eludes you, especially with history.

Imagine yourself in the scene. See what there is to be seen. Listen to the sounds. Touch the world. Smell the air. Taste it. Use all of your senses. Then evoke those experiences for the reader. If you give the audience the flavor, they'll flesh out the moment in their own imaginations.

Notice how every science fiction movie or television show starts with a shot of the location where the story is about to occur. Movies that take place in outer space always start with a shot of stars and a starship. Movies that take place on another world always start with a shot of that planet. This is to let you know where you are. Novels and stories start the same way. You have to give the reader a sense of where he is and what's happening as quickly as possible. You don't want to start the story by confusing the reader.

When I was a kid, my favorite movies were the George Pal version of 'War Of The Worlds,' 'Them,' and 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers.' Those movies were scary! They haunted my nightmares for years, so when I started writing, I wanted to write a story that was just as big and just as scary.

My approach to 'Star Trek' was, 'I know science fiction, and I know screen writing.' That was very arrogant of me, but you really need to be a little bit arrogant to think that what you have to say is good enough to justify the expense of hundreds of thousands - now millions of dollars - to make an episode of the TV show.

I would love to see writing taught online because at university like Yale, there are not enough teachers who are able to teach writing well, or in some cases, there are none.

Events don't happen because I write a speech. I am allowed to write a speech because events are going to happen.

I was trained mainly as a short story writer and that's how I started writing, but I've also become very interested in non-fiction, just because I got a couple of magazine jobs when I was really poor and needed the money and it turned out that non-fiction was much more interesting than I thought it was.

Like so many other nerdy, disaffected young people of that time, I dreamed of becoming an 'artist', i.e., somebody whose adult job was original and creative instead of tedious and dronelike.

A novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane.