Writing Quotes - Page 634

I guess I write four or five hours a day, but I do it seven days a week. It's very disciplined, yes, but it's joy for me.

The opposing missions of the various characters create the plot.

May God blast anyone who writes a biography of me.

Theodore Roosevelt regarded leadership as his one gift, the area in which he might be considered to possess genius. He presented his views on leadership throughout his voluminous writings. He intended for future writers to study them with an eye toward action, as he himself had done of historic figures.

You have two choices in life. You either die or do something with your time. You're going to be doing something - why not write?

The thing that usually gets me through the writing is that my feelings of wretched inadequacy are irregularly punctuated by brief flashes of omnipotence.

The odor of bowel wind is known to every human, but the fragrance of book glue has crossed only a fraction of mortal nostrils. And yet it behooves us not to judge the unlettered too harshly. We must stay the impulse to write CHUCKLEHEAD above their doors and carve DOLT upon their tombstones.

One of the challenges in writing the script Call Me by Your Name was that I had to find something concrete for the professor to do. In the book he is some kind of classics scholar. But I thought it would be interesting to make him into something of an art historian and archaeologist whose background was the classical world. It's always difficult when someone is supposed to be an intellectual. What do they do? You can't just film them sitting around and thinking all day. And that's what the business of the statues is all about.

I never thought I could write this much and now that it's coming to an end, I feel sad that I have to stop, sort of the way you feel at the end of a really good book and you know you're going to miss the main character. But in this case, the main character is me! Myself. Joe (formerly JoDan) Bunch. —Joe Bunch

Most of the complexity of the stories has developed as the stories came along (and may be a product of the principle that "nothing is what it seems"). I did start with some essential ambiguousness in the aliens' motivation and the questions this raises in human minds, which I consider to have been disregarded in Contact (novel and film). That, in part, may be what has delayed the writing of the fifth and sixth novelettes in the series.

[Raymond] Chandler, I reread him, and there's a lot of bad writing there. I don't think he knew much about people.

The 250-page outline for American Tabloid. The books are so dense. They're so complex, you cannot write like I write off the top of your head. It's the combination of that meticulousness and the power of the prose and, I think, the depth of the characterizations and the risks that I've taken with language that give the books their clout. And that's where I get pissed off at a lot of my younger readers.

The novel is final form; it's the ultimate individual final form. Television and motion pictures never get there. You'd be fabulous to think that something you write is even going to be filmed. I give it the best shot of which I'm capable. But it's more a payday for me. And if I didn't have alimony and the full-time assistant.

I want to have enough data, so I won't write myself into thin air, so that I can extrapolate and give you this secret human infrastructure. The only way I sate my own curiosity is to create this from scratch. There must be commanding love stories. There must be great moral cost.

I don't want to recover from writing this book [The Onion]. I feel very poised. I feel like I'm with my mother for the first time ever. I feel like I've confronted her, and the confrontation goes on.

"War gives men a plain-and-simple something to do ... Women write diaries in the hope that their words will beckon fate." It's a romantic manifesto.

You try to learn who you are. You work hard. You've either got it or you don't when it comes to writing books. And you tend to only get these things if you want them, and want them to the exclusion of everything else.

Yet technique matters, even so. God uses it, for a buffalo is not a leopard.

Down the road a bit, I would like to write a couple of stand-alone adult novels, especially in the horror genre. I've got lots of things up my sleeve.

Churchill wrote his own speeches. When a leader does that, he becomes emotionally invested with his utterances...If Churchill had had a speech write in 1940, Britain would be speaking German today.

When you recite you're giving a performance, in the way that an actor or a singer performs, and some poets are not interested in doing that, maybe because they're writing for a readership as opposed to an audience, or because they see poetry as a very private art.

Our analytical faculties allow us to look critically at our writing and interpret it. Sometimes we make bold, impulsive edits to our poems, but most forms of precision and economy in poetry, it seems to me, are signatures of the analytical mind.

As a younger man I wrote for eight years without ever earning a nickel which is a long apprenticeship, but in that time I learned a lot about my trade.

if I'd thought that nobody would like it as I was writing it, I would have written it even more. But I never think of the audience. I never think of people reading. I never think of people, period.

It's a really weird feeling when you write something and you really know it and then you watch actors come in and do it.