Writing Quotes - Page 535

I love acting, but directing and writing have always been just as important. I started to write so many things when I was even a child. I wrote my first play when I was, like, seven years old. That was me - a writer - for years.

I see things beyond what other people see. I am always looking for hidden corners and closets of a life that I feel aren't explored either by the person who lived it or the people writing about it.

You're young forever when you write. Alfred Hitchcock directed until the day he died. As long as you don't have any dementia or Alzheimer's, if you have your All-Bran every day and clear yourself out, I think your brains are gonna be all right.

The Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach who helped write the immigration laws in Arizona said that [Donald] Trump's policy advisors are drafting, they're discussing drafting a proposal, to reinstate a registry for immigrants from Muslim countries.

Screenwriting is a much more collaborative effort. When you write a novel, it's just you, with input from your editor.

I make writing as much a part of my life as I do eating or listening to music.

Nathaniel Hawthorne once said that easy reading is damn hard writing.

Poetry puts starch in your backbone so you can stand, so you can compose your life.

Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I'll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, 'I'd like to write about that.' Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.

I have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose-to find out what I think, to know where I stand.

And I refuse to feel guilty about not letter-writing either. There are times when one can, times when one can't. In the times when an enormous amount of living is going on, one can't.

I feel more alive when I'm writing than I do at any other time--except maybe when I'm making love.

You usually find me writing what I like to think of as intelligent summer action and genre films.

the only real rule I know in writing is, Don't be boring. Sleeping people don't read a word you write or hear a thing you say. How can they? They are asleep. So don't put anyone to sleep, and you will probably do okay.

I like density, not volume. I like to leave something to the imagination. The reader must fit the pieces together, with the author's discreet help.

Well, I believe that "thinking" is just as real a phenomenon in the world as anything else, and just as worthy of exploration. Maybe even more? So writing about "thought" to me is like writing about a tree or anything else real.

I've always been more than a little mystified by poets who seem to think talking to people as directly as possible is a bad thing. I mean, I don't want to set up a straw man here: I understand that for many poets - and for me, at times - writing truly means writing in a way that is difficult, simply because the poem is trying to grasp for something elusive. So the difficulty of the poem is just unavoidable, and not in any way artificially imposed. So "as possible" is the key part of the phrase above, I suppose.

I told myself that if I hoped to write a book that helped people to take a good look at some of the names that have been written on their nametags, I would need to do the same. I had to write Hello, My Name Is from a place of authenticity, even vulnerability, being willing to let God show me areas of my life that have been incorrectly shaped by false identities I've allowed to hang around for too long. I truly felt like, 'if this book is helping me, then it's going to help someone else.'

One of the things I have come up against time and again in my career is the notion that because a book is easy to read it was somehow easy to write.

There is no such thing as an "aspiring writer". You are a writer. Period.

You want to be a writer? Start writing. You want to be a filmmaker? Start shooting stuff on your phone right now.

Making your bed could be a piece of art, and writing a book could be a piece of art. You could also write a book that's not a piece of art, but that is a book, and it could be a book that was written by an artist.

In my own writing, I've mostly abandoned end-rhyme, but wordplay is still a huge part of my process. I've written a series of mermaid poems in the last few years. The first one was called "The Straightforward Mermaid" which arose from my delight in that word combination. After that, I decided that future mermaid poems would have to be words ending in "d" or "t," which led to "The Deadbeat Mermaid," "The Morbid Mermaid" and so forth . . .

I didn't lie, I was writing fiction with my mouth.

[A comic book writers' union] will never happen. Someone will always be willing to write Batman for free. ... You sit at a bar with an editor at a show and you see 19 people come up and pitch ideas at them. If everybody writing the top 20 books all quit and demanded, 'Union now, union forever,' those 19 guys would be getting phone calls. There will never be a union. I think things are getting better - I bet things have never been so good - but there will never be a union.