Writing Quotes - Page 680

I came into screenwriting from an odd direction, because the first screenplay that I read was and is better as writing than the top one percent of literary novels.

I never write with particular actors in mind.

If you write a screenplay that gets circulated, you have a bigger readership than any literary novelist. And it's an educated audience as well.

Poetry died as a commercial form and then it died as a serious art form. No one serious touches it. It used to be that somebody like F. Scott Fitzgerald could make a high middle-class income from working as a short story writer for the Saturday Evening Post and other outlets. That doesn't happen anymore. It used to be that a legitimate playwright could make a living on Broadway from writing decent plays.

I had a long writing history behind me before I got into anything in film. It comprehended science fiction, it comprehended historical, it comprehended, you know, just about everything that you can think of.

It's been very much in the blood since I started imagining films or shooting with 8mm when I was a kid. I made some films and thought about films, but then I went into writing. Becket is something that's definitely on the cards. We have to see where that fits in the schedule, because it's a big picture and I have a lot of writing obligations at the moment. I'm wary of anything with a budget over a certain amount.

Yeah, well I can't see a situation where I wouldn't at least re-write as a director something I was going to direct. At the moment, I wouldn't direct anything that I hadn't written. I can now say, as everybody else says, that it all depends on the script.

Well, you're in a theater and it's 24 shots a second, your face, your body, your voice, and it's your craft, the way you earn your living, and it's indelible. It's not like writing a script - I write as well - I can't do another draft, it's done.

I write, and when see a movie in which it's supernatural, some other worlds, or some other aspect to our world that we're not aware of, and [they] don't explain what the rules are, that kind of stuff drives me crazy.

Tides of History provides a splendid prism through which we may view the wider world of Victorian science. . . . Historians of science will have cause to heap praise on this book, but so too will the non-specialists. The author's splendid writing style, at times appropriately Puckish, makes this work an accessible and enjoyable read.

It's difficult to write a book where a character is on virtually every page of the book but you cannot refer to his or her gender. It gets rid of every his, her, she and he.

I don't ever write with a particular audience in mind. I just write books that please me.

When I was 30 or so - by that time I had become an assistant D.A. - I decided I would try to write a novel. To be clear: I did not decide to become a novelist. Honestly, it never crossed my mind that I could actually earn a living as a professional novelist.

You never write down to the people - you write the best you can with the hope that someone else will feel the same way.

A lot of joblessness in the black community doesn't seem to be reachable through fiscal and monetary policies. People have not been drawn into the labor market even during periods of economic recovery. Employers would rather not hire a lot of workers from the inner city. They feel people from the inner city are not job-ready, that the kids have been poorly educated, that they can't read, they can't write, they can't speak.

The nation blest above all nations is she in whom the civic genius of the people does the saving day by day, by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans and empty quacks.

Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text

Poetry is only the highest eloquence of passion, the most vivid form of expression that can be given to our conception of anything, whether pleasurable or painful, mean or dignified, delightful or distressing. It is the perfect coincidence of the image and the words with the feeling we have, and of which we cannot get rid in any other way, that gives an instant "satisfaction to the thought." This is equally the origin of wit and fancy, of comedy and tragedy, of the sublime and pathetic.

To expect an author to talk as he writes is ridiculous; or even if he did you would find fault with him as a pedant.

It is better to be able neither to read nor write than to be able to do nothing else.

I gave up lots of things I love doing: writing, and business, and playing the piano and so on.

I'm really proud of the writing on Door to Door, and I think that's the Emmy that meant the most - the writing.

I love making movies, I love the differentness of it, I love writing. But I've always liked television. I grew up on television.

Writers love to write those idiotic, long stage directions, and some of them worse than others. They have nothing to do with the movie. They're just jerking around.

I publish a piece in order to kill it, so that I won't have to fool around with it any longer.