Writing Quotes - Page 764

I've never yet managed to write a novel which didn't have an Indian central character.

Sometimes writing a novel is not unlike having a baby. You'd have to ask a female novelist to compare the pain.

I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.

When you are writing a book, it feels as if you are simply concentrating on the world of the book and that whatever is happening in your personal life is outside the room, as it were. But maybe that's just the way you have to talk to yourself to make it possible.

When you start writing about the stuff that is the central experience of your own life, you can talk about whatever you want, in whatever way you want.

Matthew Wiener on Mad Men writes the entire series before they start shooting, and if you have that, then what you can do with character and story is not at all unlike what you can do in a novel.

When I'm writing books, something weird happens; and the result is the books contain a large amount of what you could call 'supernaturalism.' As a writer, I find I need that to explain the world I'm writing about.

I'm a big-city boy. What I like is big cities. It's not just what I like. It's what I write about.

When I'm writing a book, sentence by sentence, I'm not thinking theoretically. I'm just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I've got.

If I had simply wanted to trade on an insult to Islam, I could have done it in a sentence rather than writing a 250,000-word novel, a work of fiction.

Someone asked me if I was afraid to write my memoirs. I told him: 'We have to stop drawing up accounts of fear! We live in a society in which people are allowed to tell their story, and that is what I do.'

I don't read my books, I write them. Once I've finished the many years it usually takes me to write them, I can't bear to read them, because I've spent too long with them already. I'm not advertising them very well, am I?

What I found interesting writing a screenplay as opposed to writing a novel is not the obvious thing, which is having to pare everything down and find the kind of essence, the skeleton if you like, which can then be fleshed out by performance and cinematography.

I often write into recipes techniques that I learned in the restaurant kitchen. There are ways of organizing your prep and so on that are immensely useful. Those are woven into all the recipes I do.

Newspapers don't write enough about serious religious issues.

Comedians have to write to survive because you don't get cast for your beauty.

As a writer myself, my job has very often been to also write on the job. So you get the script and a vague idea of how the scene might work, and you then add funny words or change the script. I'm not the world's best writer or the world's best actor, but I can do that thing where I can fix - or ruin - fix-slash-ruin, add quirk, add value.

When I write, I create really absurd situations which become false because I am after the joke.

I definitely used to write a lot at school. Comic poetry and drawings about people.

If I wish to be well in my mind, then I must write, and there is no cure for my ambition, and thank the Lord for that.

I wish I could be a better writer, but writing is so difficult. I get seduced by visual aesthetics. Because I just like making beautiful pictures, sometimes I wander away from making a clear statement.

In a successful picture book, you always want the voice of the text to match the voice of the art; so that it seems as if the same person writing is the one illustrating and vice versa.

I have some great stories and I will get around to writing a book.

I remember once giving my dad some drawings and writings and said, 'If you could just give these to the publisher, that would be great.' And I was about five!

There were the days when women were under contract, and they were thought of as a commodity, so they hired the best writers and a lot of them were women at the time. This was in the thirties and forties, to make product for the people who were under contract, who were their assets to the studios. But that doesn't exist anymore - and as a result, the people who are in the industry write products that interest them.