Writing Quotes - Page 380

As to writing another book on geometry [to replace Euclid] the middle ages would have as soon thought of composing another New Testament.

The sacred writings excepted, no Greek has been so much read and so variously translated as Euclid.

As a writer, you can't allow yourself the luxury of being discouraged and giving up when you are rejected, either by agents or publishers. You absolutely must plow forward.

I'll always write about what's going on in my life and the reason for that is it's not actually because I'm so fascinated with myself, it's because I can't think. I can't think like have thoughts in my head and think them through and come to a conclusion. It's like math for me.

What an occupation! To sit and flay your fellow men and then offer their skins for sale and expect them to buy them.

When you're working with a smaller budget I suppose one of the things that has to be in your mind when you are writing is that you have to keep the characters down to a minimum.

Night-time is when I brainstorm; last thing, when the family's asleep and I'm alone, I think about the next day's writing and plan a strategy for my assault on the blank page.

I have always been able to write on the spot. It is a talent that I guess comes naturally.

No one writes anything worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject.

A playwright... is... the litmus paper of the arts. He's got to be, because if he isn't working on the same wave length as the audience, no one would know what in hell he was talking about.

It has always seemed to me that so long as you produce your dramatic effect, accuracy of detail matters little. I have never striven for it and I have made some bad mistakes in consequence. What matter if I hold my readers?

Sir Walter, with his 61 years of life, although he never wrote a novel until he was over 40, had, fortunately for the world, a longer working career than most of his brethren.

I'm sure we would not have had men on the Moon if it had not been for Wells and Verne and the people who write about this and made people think about it. I'm rather proud of the fact that I know several astronauts who became astronauts through reading my books.

There is a special sadness in achievement, in the knowledge that a long-desired goal has been attained at last, and that life must now be shaped toward new ends.

A writer who can't write in a grammerly manner better shut up shop.

Writing humor in my column isn't as dangerous as performing it. If I fail in front of a live audience, the humiliation is as great as anything a human being can suffer.

I think many writers write because it's a convenient way to explain themselves to themselves. We take the chaos and the turmoil and the bullshit of our lives, and we make it into something that has a harmonious shape and sound.

Write what makes you laugh not what you think will make someone else laugh.

I think crime writing is my link with trying to preserve a sort of order.

One usually dislikes a play while writing it, but afterward it grows on one. Let others judge and make decisions.

Write about this man who, drop by drop, squeezes the slave's blood out of himself until he wakes one day to find the blood of a real human being--not a slave's--coursing through his veins.

No new reader, however charitable, could open “Fifty Shades of Grey,” browse a few paragraphs, and reasonably conclude that the author was writing in her first language, or even her fourth.

Writing music always happened for me in periods when I wasn't under the influence of mind-altering substance.

I love opera, I love writing for the voice, I love telling stories with music.

I want to branch out. I want to write. I write poetry. I want to see my children grow up well.