Writing Quotes - Page 779

The first goal of writing is to have one's words read successfully.

Elizabeth Searle writes with intelligence, passion and wit. She's one of the best young writers around.

Writing is such a solitary thing, so its nice, when Im discouraged, to see people still have such faith in fiction.

You say to yourself, Well, this poem isn't going to be any good, but I'll write it anyway.

I wanted to spend all my time writing poetry. But when I had children I couldn't do that anymore.

If Shakespeare were alive today and writing comedy for the movies, he would be the head-liner for the Mack Sennett studios.

Nine-tenths of the value of a sense of humor in writing is not in the things it makes one write but in the things it keeps one from writing. It is especially valuable in this respect in serious writing, and no one without a sense of humor should ever write seriously. For without knowing what is funny, one is constantly in danger of being funny without knowing it.

You write a spec, and you pour your heart and soul and life into a spec, and you think that spec is the movie that's going to sell and get made... I've never heard of anybody that happened to. What happens is, you write a spec, people get it, they see your writing, they see you're good, they bring you into their office and they say, "Boy, that spec was really good - we'll never make that in a million years. We have rights to the board game of Monopoly. What do you think about a Monopoly movie?".

I liked writing, and I loved movies, obsessively loved movies, but I had never made the leap of thinking I would actually come out here and write stuff.

For a living I write stuff that I know is gonna sell to a studio and make a lot of money at the multiplex.

Not taking criticism of your writing personally is an enormous step towards surviving the studio system.

You have to be willing to throw [writing] stuff away and replace it.

You need to know that going in, and you also need to be able to write all the time. So when somebody looks at you across the table and says, "What do you think about a movie where Miley Cyrus switches souls with a basset hound?" You need to be able to sit there and figure out how to make that possibly shootable.

If I'm reading something and a word pops up, or I just catch it, I try to mark it off and then, later, write it down on a piece of paper and add it to my list.

I was also a good writer, by the way. My, you know, my English teacher and writing teacher loved my writing. You know, I wrote short stories and things like that. And they liked them very much.

Art was something that I was really interested in, probably more so than writing or anything else.

I have reached the point where I know that as long as I sit down to write, the ideas will come. What they will be, I don't know.

Writing thats not working for a living.

In The Art and Aesthetics of Boxing, David Scott addresses the daunting task of establishing a groundwork for the aesthetics of boxing-and succeeds with consummate authority. . . . In Scott's incisive blend of art history, sociology, and sports writing, he makes a daring and original statement about fighters and the artists who enshrined them.

Philosophy can forsake too easily the details of experience… many writers and painters have demonstrated that thinking long about what art is or ought to be ruins the power to write or paint.

But if you didn't have more urgent things to do after supper [in boot camp], you could write a letter, loaf, gossip, discuss the myriad mental shortcomings of sergeants and, dearest of all, talk about the female of the species (we became convinced that there was no such creatures, just mythology created by inflamed imaginations - one boy in our company claimed to have seen a girl, over at regimental headquarters; he was unanimously judged a liar and a braggart).

Who is more real? Homer or Ulysses? Shakespeare or Hamlet? Burroughs or Tarzan?

I took up writing because I needed money. And I continued to write because it's safer than stealing and easier than working.

Finish what you start. Keep submitting until it sells.

I write about things that tear me apart, and it's all very personal to me. It's funny to hear people disassemble the lyrics. If they get it wrong, it almost means more to me, because it's morphed into something that is meaningful to them.