Writing Quotes - Page 633

Some of my favorite movies are action movies. You want something good to say. That comes from good writing. But writing is not a skill I possess, unfortunately.

'Alien' asked ground-breaking questions about eco-politics and female empowerment. 'The Matrix' delved deeper into the concept of perception versus reality than perhaps any other film I know. But for some reason, we tend not to remember the significance of their writing.

My writing voice is very much like 'Thank You for Smoking.' It's a guy's voice. It's very masculine.

As far as writing, I like watching bad movies. Nothing stops me in my tracks more than watching a great film like 'The Godfather' or 'Dog Day Afternoon' or 'The Graduate.' You watch one of those, and you never want to write again. Whereas with bad movies, it makes you think, If that counts, I certainly could write.

Rian Johnson's 'Looper' is inventive, entertaining, and thought-provoking in every way a movie can be. It is in fact the kind of movie that reminds us why we watch them and make them, a beautifully told story that deserves to be not only remembered, but acknowledged for its writing.

The first thing I say when people ask what's the difference [between doing TV and film], is that film has an ending and TV doesn't. When I write a film, all I think about is where the thing ends and how to get the audience there. And in television, it can't end. You need the audience to return the next week. It kind of shifts the drive of the story. But I find that more as a writer than as a director.

When I write a film, all I think about is where the thing ends and how to get the audience there.

If you listen first, and write later, then what you write will have had time to filter through your brain and you'll be in what you say. This is what makes you exist. If you are only a reflector of information, are you really there?

When I write what publishers call 'fantasy' I am writing in what I think is the most important tradition of fiction: starting with Homer and up through Shakespeare and Milton, the most important themes to tackle are those of the mythopoeic domain, tales of the body and mind seen through a temperament and a cosmos divorced from current reality so what is said can be more clear.

If you want to write something completely unique, you will probably fail or at best write something without redeeming value. The mind works in certain patterns: the mind organizes facts in story form; it is your commonality with that body of human thought that makes a good book, not its estrangement from the common values that humans share.

Being in the library is so addictive for me that I really have to exercise self-control so I can get some writing done at home.

The only justification for writing a novel is that it should be wonderful. Adequate is inadequate.

Write, write, and write some more. Think of writing as a muscle that needs lots of exercise.

I have acting technique; I have singing technique; I don't have a writing technique to fall back on.

I write because to write a new sentence, let alone a new poem, is to cross the threshold into both a larger existence and a profound mystery. A thought was not there, then it is. An image, a story, an idea about what it is to be human, did not exist, then it does. With every new poem, an emotion new to the heart, to the world, speaks itself into being.

I always loved animals. And when I was ten, I decided I had to go to Africa and live with animals and write books about them.

Movies are collective, cooperative endeavours, which I like a lot. But writing is all up to you, it's what's so scary; it's just you and that page. But I really like it a lot.

It is this delightful habit of journalizing which largely contributes to form the easy style of writing for which ladies are so generally celebrated. Every body allows that the talent of writing is particularly female. Nature might have done something, but I am sure it must be essentially assisted by the practice of keeping a journal.

Teaching writing puts you on the point of a pin in terms of what you want your own writing to be.

I resist the idea that travel writing has got to be factual.

Writing is a way of processing our lives. And it can be a way of healing.

[Lord Brougham's writings on the bee's cell contain] as striking examples of bad reasoning as are often to be met with in writings related to mathematical subjects.

At forty my faculties may have closed up like flowers at evening, leaving me unable to write my memoirs with a fitting and discreet inaccuracy, or, having written them, unable to carry them to the publisher.

I drew pictures rapidly and with few lines, because I had to write most of the pieces, too, and couldn't monkey long with the drawings. The divine urge was no higher than that.

Tyranny and fantasy both like to write everyone else's lines.