Writing Quotes - Page 444

The artwork had very little to do with the thought process, and the writing too, for that matter. What happens, happens, and it happens outside the brain.

I hadn't read or heard a lot about [Tom] Wolfe until I read this script, and in that way I think it was really clever to write a piece about him instead of Max Perkins,[Ernest] Hemingway, [John] Fitzgerald, or others that people have strong opinions of already.

I put on a big show when I write something I think is funny.

When I write now I do not invent situation, characters, or actions, but rather structures and discursive forms, textual groupings which are combined according to secret affinities among themselves, as in architecture or the plastic arts.

The vehemence with which certain critics have chosen not simply to criticize what I've written, but to challenge my writing this story at all, speaks of what the book is about: fear of disapproval.

I believe every one of us possesses a fundamental right to tell our own story.

When poets - write about food it is usually celebratory. Food as the thing-in-itself, but also the thoughtful preparation of meals, the serving of meals, meals communally shared: a sense of the sacred in the profane.

The first sentence cant be written until the final sentence is written.

I haven't any formal schedule, but I love to write in the morning, before breakfast. Sometimes the writing goes so smoothly that I don't take a break for many hours - and consequently have breakfast at two or three in the afternoon on good days.

Without craft, art remains private. Without art, craft is merely hackwork.

If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?

The writer doesn’t write for the reader. He doesn’t write for himself, either. He writes to serve…something. Somethingness. The somethingness that is sheltered by the wings of nothingness — those exquisite, enveloping, protecting wings.

One writes to find words' meanings.

There is something unwholesome and destructive about the entire writing process.

Equality is not a concept. It's not something we should be striving for. It's a necessity. Equality is like gravity, we need it to stand on this earth as men and women, and the misogyny that is in every culture is not a true part of the human condition. It is life out of balance and that imbalance is sucking something out of the soul of every man and woman who's confronted with it. We need Equality, and we kind of need it now. 'So why do you write these strong female characters?' Because you're still asking that question.

I write to be the characters that I am not.

Limitations are something that I latch onto - like working in genre, or if you're writing TV, there are act breaks, there's a length of time it's supposed to be. The restrictions of budget and sets can be really useful. When you can have everything, it's very hard to make things feel real and lived in.

People always say I write a lot of pop culture references. Can somebody please count the pop culture references in 'Firefly?' Because I don't know how to put this to you, but there was one. I referenced The Beatles in the pilot.

If something isn't working, if you have a story that you've built and it's blocked and you can't figure it out, take your favorite scene, or your very best idea or set-piece, and cut it. It's brutal, but sometimes inevitable.

Don’t give people what they want, give them what they need.

You either have to write or you shouldn't be writing. That's all.

I'm supposed to be taking time off. But I'm still writing and I have this Gap advert lined up.

It is not necessary to argue to those for whom I write that the two great needs of mankind, that all men may be lifted up into the light of the highest Christian civilization, are, first, a pure, spiritual Christianity, and, second, civil liberty.

I think that's an interesting point of being a songwriter, is to write songs that make people think.

I think it's a very bad idea for someone to start writing for a readership.