Writing Quotes - Page 960

The professions of novelist and journalist are very separate. As a novelist, you are ultimately working for yourself. Yes, you need the approval of a publisher and an audience, but what is valued in fiction writing - style, individual voice, insight - is scorned by the editor who is combing through your newspaper article.

I was very disciplined when home - lights out for the girls at 9:00, two hours of writing for me. It was murder on my marriage.

It is simply much easier to infuse life, feeling, and higher truth into a novel than a non-fiction work, to find the license to write truth without being wedded to fact.

I was very conscious of race as I was writing. I was lucky to have spent real time in Portuguese Africa, but I am white and my main characters are white, outsiders at sea in the "Dark Continent."

It's so damn hard to write a great historical mystery based on fact. It's not for lack of trying.

I think of myself as a comedian who has the pleasure of writing jokes about things that I actually care about, and that's really it. I have great respect for people who are in the front lines and the trenches of trying to enact social change, but I am far lazier than that.

Do you know what writing a book is? It's sitting alone in a room for weeks without making contact with another human. I felt like Howard Hughes.

When my syndicated show got canceled, the next day I still knew how to write jokes. That was a huge revelation. Because at first you think, "I won't have any shelter! What am I gonna do? The sun is hot. Very thirsty."

People don't understand that we're not warriors in their cause. We're a group of people that really feel that they want to write jokes about the absurdity that we see in government and the world and all that, and that's it.

For a successful writer, the secret is to have many irons in the fire. Write the next thing.

The science fiction I write comes from a pretty deep pool of literature, not just from the reflection of other science fiction films, and I think that gives me somewhat deeper roots.

You don't control whether your movies get made. You can't. All you can control is whether your draft is great. So, you write your great draft, as best as you can, and then move on to the next thing.

I'd wanted to be a writer since I was knee-high. Once I knew that books were written by people and didn't just happen, it was obviously that I would write them, too.

I studied physics at Princeton when I was a college student, and my initial intention was to major in it but to also be a writer. What I discovered, because it was a very high-powered physics program with its own fusion reactor, was that to keep up with my fellow students in that program I would need to dedicate myself to math and physics all the time and let writing go. And I couldn't let writing go, so I let physics go and became a science fan and a storyteller.

If you write songs and if you write music that's very sincere and very honest, it's pop music, but it is pop music with a lot of honesty and a lot of heart.

Obviously, I like to write stories that are page-turners. But I always try my very, very hardest to be as factually true as possible.

As I glanced at the phraseology of the research report, dull and unfathomable to outsiders like me, I thought that if you have the ambition to become a villain, the first thing you should do is learn to be impenetrable. Don’t act like Blofeld—monocled and ostentatious. We journalists love writing about eccentrics. We hate writing about impenetrable, boring people. It makes us look bad: the duller the interviewee, the duller the prose. If you want to get away with wielding true, malevolent power, be boring.

Trying to solve the mystery is what I enjoy most about writing.

Artists are perceptive, but they choose to write songs or make movies or paint pictures rather than simply keeping private diaries.

For me going to war offers me the ability to write about apparently very alien, sometimes hated or despised people, who've been objectified in a way that restores their humanity. Hopefully for my readers, that denies them the ability to objectify them. I think that's the point. If you can do that, that's a good thing.

As a performing group, the Beatles began by playing old rock favorites, for dancing, to tough audiences in Liverpool and Hamburg. When they began writing seriously, they discovered that they couldn't compose in the early American rock tradition.

James Taylor is the kind of person I always thought the word 'folksinger' referred to. He writes and sings songs that are reflections of his own life, and performs in them in his own style. All of his performances are marked by an eloquent simplicity.

I never studied writing, but I'd always been a reader and had a secret fantasy about being a writer.

The reward is the finished product, for me that is my light at the end of the tunnel. What comes together in the end is why I do this [shoot commercials], it's why I write so many ideas and spend so much time thinking of ideas and so on and so forth.

People care enough to write blogs and reviews and things, which is nice.