Writing Quotes - page 22

Your whole life you are really writing one book, which is an attempt to grasp the consciousness of your time and place– a single book written from different stages of your ability. (Nadine Gordimer)
One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. View quote
Ralph Waldo Emerson
And I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle. View quote
Kurt Vonnegut
Chomsky proceeds on the almost unthinkably subversive assumption that the United States should be judged by the same standards that it preaches (often at gunpoint) to other nations he is nearly the only person now writing who assumes a single standard of international morality not for rhetorical effect, but as a matter of habitual, practically instinctual conviction. View quote
Christopher Hitchens
I started acting when I was in high school, started writing when I got to New York in 1975. View quote
Eric Bogosian
Writing with a simplified alphabet checked the power of custom of an oral tradition but implied a decline in the power of expression and the creation of grooves which determined the channels of thought of readers and later writers. View quote
Harold Innis
Following the invention of writing, the special form of heightened language, characteristic of the oral tradition and a collective society, gave way to private writing. Records and messages displaced the collective memory. Poetry was written and detached from the collective festival. View quote
Harold Innis
Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself - it is the occurring which is difficult. View quote
Stephen Leacock
I began to write what I called 'rhythms' ie unrhymed pieces with no formal metrical scheme where the rhythm was created by a kind if inner chant.. Later I was told I was writing 'free verse' or Vers libre. View quote
Richard Aldington
Eighty percent of a picture is writing, the other twenty percent is the execution, such as having the camera on the right spot and being able to afford to have good actors in all parts. View quote
Billy Wilder
Dreams are illustrations... from the book your soul is writing about you. (Marsha Norman)
It is in this matter that I fall foul of so many American writers on writing; they seem to think that writing is a confidence game by means of which the author cajoles a restless, dull-witted, shallow audience into hearing his point of view. Such an attitude is base, and can only beget base prose. View quote
Robertson Davies
Great drama, drama that may reach the alchemical level, must have dimension and its relevance will take care of itself. Writing about AIDS rather than the cocktail set, or possibly the fairy kingdom, will not guarantee importance.... The old comment that all periods of time are at an equal distance from eternity says much, and pondering on it will lead to alchemical theatre while relevance becomes old hat. View quote
Robertson Davies
I am partly not conscious of structure with my movies but this is when I am writing. I leave my mind very free and then I correct it after. View quote
Pedro Almodóvar
It's precisely on the Internet that the majority of the writing is terribly bad and uninteresting. View quote
Peter Greenaway
This is where I begin to do the writing. I am now going to be the pen and not the paper. View quote
Peter Greenaway
Film is such an extraordinary rich medium which can handle so many different modes of operation, combining together in the same place all these extraordinary disciplines which may be executed in their own right -- music, writing, picture making of all kinds, and I often feel that some filmmakers make films with one eye closed and two hands tied behind their backs. View quote
Peter Greenaway
Once upon a time a Georgian printed a couple of books that attracted notice, but immediately it turned out that he was little more than an amanuensis for the local blacks--that his works were really the products, not of white Georgia, but of black Georgia. Writing afterward as a white man, he swiftly subsided into the fifth rank. View quote
Joel Chandler Harris
A society can exist - many do exist - without writing, but no society can exist without reading. View quote
Alberto Manguel
The listeners who buy books after a reading multiply that reading; the author who realizes that he or she may be writing on a blank page but is at least not speaking to a blank wall may be encouraged by the experience, and write more. View quote
Alberto Manguel
The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any. (Russell Baker)
I have to have a character worth caring about. I tend not to start writing books about people I don't have a lot of sympathy for because I'm just going to be with them too long. View quote
Richard Russo
By ignoring a lot of American culture you can write more interesting stories. Unfortunately, if you were writing about America as it is, you'd be writing about a lot of people sitting in front of television sets. View quote
Richard Russo
Normally I work out a general summary of what I mean to do, then start writing, and the details can be different from my anticipation. So there is considerable flow, but always within channels. View quote
Piers Anthony
When I started writing this, I found that I simply couldn't take fantasy seriously, so it became humorous, and continued from there. View quote
Piers Anthony