Writing Quotes - Page 906

I don't want to take up literature in a money-making spirit, or be very anxious about making large profits, but selling it at a loss is another thing altogether, and an amusement I cannot well afford.

In autumn, when the leaves are brown, Take pen and ink, and write it down.

For first you write a sentence, And then you chop it small; Then mix the bits and sort them out Just as they chance to fall: The order of the phrases makes no difference at all.

I'm not a great joke writer, which is odd for a comic to say, but I'm not. So it's hard for me to come up with things, because I don't write stuff, I don't write my act down.

I never write anything down. I write onstage.

Stand-up is the only thing in which you actually write it, act it and direct it simultaneously, so it's actually a great theater exercise.

When you're done [with writing a book], people tell you "Well, gee, I'm not interested." "Great, I'm glad I sat down and wrote this!"

There is no law by which to determine the superiority of nations; hence the vanity of the claim, and the idleness of disputes about it. A people risen, run their race, and die either of themselves or at the hands of another, who, succeeding to their power, take possession of their place, and upon their monuments write new names; such is history.

It's very important, at least to me as a writer, that there be some rules on the table when I'm writing. Rules come from genres. You're writing in a genre, there are rules, which is great because then you can break the rules. That's when really exciting things happen.

One already feels like an anachronism, writing novels in the age of what-ever-this-is-the-age-of, but touring to promote them feels doubly anachronistic. The marketplace is showing an increasing intolerance for the time-honored practice of printing information on paper and shipping it around the country.

Read everything. If you haven't read everything, you'll never be able to write anything.

Nothing is wrong with you. You're not different. Everybody feels as bad as you do: this is just what writing a novel feels like. To write a novel is to come in contact with raw, primal feelings, hopes and longings and psychic wounds, and try to make a big public word-sculpture out of them, and that is a crazy hard thing to do.

I used to write in a local coffee shop, but there was another guy, another writer, who kept sitting in my favorite seat. I would show up, and he would be there, and I would get exiled to a couch or something, and it would throw me off my game.

More than fantasy or even science fiction, Ray Bradbury wrote horror, and like so many great horror writers he was himself utterly without fear, of anything. He wasn't afraid of looking uncool - he wasn't scared to openly love innocence, or to be optimistic, or to write sentimentally when he felt that way.

There's a special gut-check moment the first time you write a scene in which somebody casts a spell.

The biggest misconception is that I only write about shitty people. Or that I'm trying to be shocking. I just think people are super weird, so I like to write characters that get addicted to things, lose their minds, hurt others, put themselves in bad situations. I'm just more interested in that.

I challenged myself to write/direct a romantic comedy. People trash talk the rom com, but it's one of the oldest cinematic genres, with stellar origins like Twentieth Century and Trouble in Paradise. I think as audiences lost their innocence, the genre lost its suspense. To create suspense, you need obstacles, so I gave my couple an obstacle that very few people ever overcome: their own behavior and their past.

Think about the stories you have inside that scare you. That's what you should be writing. I and others call that writing from the dark place. Our humiliations and secret fears and deepest anxieties, those times where we were at our worst: that's the best material.

Writing is my way of trying to understand vast things that probably I'll never truly understand, a way of exploring a Big Question, of wrestling meaning from the chaos of life. Consequently, when I choose to write overtly or even secretly about my real life, it's always something difficult and complicated that I'm longing to make sense of.

I dislike that premise implies that a fiction writer is incapable of dreaming up stories that can bring readers to tears, that if you are lucky enough to be living a pretty sedate life ,as I am, you've got nothing worthy of writing about, that you're incapable of making a reader's gut wrench.Frankly, that's what makes readers nervous, the sorcery of you or me or any good fiction writer making up characters who feel like real people, of telling a story that feels true but isn't.

When I was writing the book, I thought "Who wants to hear another story about some actor who lost his way?" But my story is a little unique in that I realized when I was 14 years old that I was different. I think a lot of gay people use drugs and alcohol to quell that fear and shame - especially people of my age.

Whenever I've been stuck on a project, it's always brought me solace to the return to books that moved me in the past. It's a nice way to get outside my own head; and it brings me back to one of the most important reasons I write at all: to bring some pleasure to readers, to make them think or feel.

Armchair poverty tourism has been around as long as authors have written about class. As an author, I have struggled myself with the nuances of writing about poverty without reducing any community to a catalog of its difficulties.

When people ask what kind of nonfiction I write, I say 'all kinds,' but really I mean I don’t write any kind at all: I’m trying to dissolve the borders between memoir and journalism and criticism by weaving them together.

Do you have to do murder? Do we have to do murder? Sure we have to do murder. There are only two subjects--a woman's chastity, and murder. Nobody's interested in chastity any more. Murder's all we got to write stories about.