Quotes about writing
writing ideas surface
If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea. Elizabeth Bowen
writing people should
Dialogue should show the relationships among people.
writing reality may
The writer, like a swimmer caught by an undertow, is borne in an unexpected direction. He is carried to a subject which has awaited him--a subject sometimes no part of his conscious plan. Reality, the reality of sensation, has accumulated where it was least sought. To write is to be captured--captured by some experience to which one may have given hardly a thought.
writing bears
Bring all your intelligence to bear on your beginning.
writing light color
Often when I write I am trying to make words do the work of line and color. I have the painter's sensitivity to light. Much of my writing is verbal painting.
writing character unique
What must novel dialogue . . . really be and do? It must be pointed, intentional, relevant. It must crystallize situation. It must express character. It must advance plot. During dialogue, the characters confront one another. The confrontation is in itself an occasion. Each one of these occasions, throughout the novel, is unique.
writing character mean
Dialogue is the ideal means of showing what is between the characters. It crystallizes relationships. It should, ideally, be so effective as to make analysis or explanation of the relationships between the characters unnecessary.
writing character fighting
Short of a small range of physical acts-a fight, murder, lovemaking-dialogue is the most vigorous and visible inter-action of which characters in a novel are capable. Speech is what characters do to each other.
writing dialogue deals
All good dialogue perhaps deals with something unprecedented.
writing thoughtful thinking
Temperamentally, the writer exists on happenings, on contacts, conflicts, action and reaction, speed, pressure, tension. Were he acontemplative purely, he would not write.
writing intelligent thinking
I am fully intelligent only when I write. I have a certain amount of small-change intelligence, which I carry round with me as, at any rate in a town, one has to carry small money, for the needs of the day, the non-writing day. But it seems to me I seldom purely think ... if I thought more I might write less.
writing style phony
Style is the thing that's always a bit phony, and at the same time you cannot write without style.
writing looks littles
... it appears to me that problems, inherent in any writing, loom unduly large when one looks ahead. Though nothing is easy, little is quite impossible.
writing eye adults
The writer, unlike his non-writing adult friend, has no predisposed outlook; he seldom observes deliberately. He sees what he didnot intend to see; he remembers what does not seem wholly possible. Inattentive learner in the schoolroom of life, he keeps some faculty free to veer and wander. His is the roving eye.
writing boys pigs
Yes, writing a novel, my boy, is like driving pigs to market - you have one of them making a bolt down the wrong lane; another won't get over the right stile ...
writing past wish
... in nine out of ten cases the original wish to write is the wish to make oneself felt[ellipsis in source] the non-essential writer never gets past that wish.
writing paper littles
Nothing arrives on paper as it started, and so much arrives that never started at all. To write is always to rave a little-even if one did once know what one meant
writing literature firsts
The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written.
writing character mistress
Jane Austen, much in advance of her day, was a mistress of the use of the dialogue. She used it as dialogue should be used-to advance the story; not only to show the characters, but to advance.
writing said turns
What is being said is the effect of something that has happened; at the same time, what is being said is in itself something happening, which will, in turn, leave its effect.
writing names
Everything that I write will be signed with my name. Elinor Glyn
writing mail
Never write when you can talk. Never talk when you can nod. And never put anything in an e-mail. Eliot Spitzer
writing attention may
I cannot stand public attention, I just can't. Of course, if I may I might write something instead Elfriede Jelinek
writing feelings want
I do not want to have the feeling of writing "for eternity," so to speak.
writing worry feelings
I have the feeling it will influence my future writing to the extent that without any material worries I could develop a greater ease, even lightheartedness, in my writing
writing character voice
Whether I'm writing the script, or someone else writes the initial draft, I'm always an actor's director first. I always try to listen to them a lot, and try to put their voices into their character. Dito Montiel
writing thinking ideas
I think the idea is now for blacks to write about the history of our music. It's time for that, because whites have been doing it all the time. It's time for us to do it ourselves and tell it like it is. Dizzy Gillespie
writing cuz scripts
Anybody can write a film script 'cuz it has been reduced to a formula. Dirk Benedict
writing college acting
To me, all writing is like music. And especially dialogue. I studied music in college; that is what I wanted to be, a composer. Acting got me sidetracked.
writing parent becoming
I write from the same place I parent, and since becoming a single parent, I have found it difficult, if not impossible, to write anything of length.
writing wife done
It helps to be able to be alone. 'Cuz writing is done alone, unless you collaborate, but I don't do that. Ask my ex-wife.
writing kissing peers
I had said before that I'd never write an autobiography because I've been around, and there's a lot that I've seen and heard that stays with me. That's just mine. I didn't want to do a kiss-and-tell, as some of my peers have. Dionne Warwick
writing together letters
Someday, I'm gonna write a poem in a letter; Someday, I'm gonna get that faculty together. David Bowie