If a woman writes about a domestic situation, everyone automatically assumes that it’s about her.
I’m hugely affected by what people think. It could be a million people saying, ‘Great.’ And then one person writes, ‘What the hell is this kid doing?’ and starts slagging me off, for some reason, and then I have to join in the blog and sign in under a different name and go,’Why don’t you like him?’
In history, one gathers clues like a detective, tries to present an honest account of what most likely happened, and writes a narrative according to what we know and, where we aren’t absolutely sure, what might be most likely to have happened, within the generally accepted rules of evidence and sources.
The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.
I’ve always loved the dialogue that Pedro Almodovar writes.
When someone writes to tell me something I’ve written made them laugh or cry, I’ve done my job and done it well. The rest is all semantics.
It was a long time ago: ‘Angela’s Ashes’ by Frank McCourt. It was a great story that was lasting, and I loved it so much. I also love Nora Ephron. I gobble up everything she writes. Also, I love Anthony Bourdain, very irreverent and funny.
The poet is like the earth’s shadow. The sun moves, and the poet writes something down.
I love Bill Finn’s stuff. It’s so rewarding for an actor. It’s conversational but intricate. He writes some beautiful, simple songs and melodies, but he also writes this cacophony for people.
When it’s something you really adore, I think you don’t want to be the one who accidentally writes a crap episode.
Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.
I dreamed of being an actress when I was a little kid because you don’t know then that the writer writes everything the actor is saying. But as I got older, I got into college and became more aware that writing is another option, and I started getting into it, too.
There’s this idea of a star, and this person is very aloof and writes all the music, and they don’t talk to anyone unless they go through the record label. And I always felt very uncomfortable about that.
If a man writes a book, let him set down only what he knows. I have guesses enough of my own.
A novelist, poet and playwright who writes equally well in Shona and English, Charles Mungoshi is Zimbabwe’s finest and most versatile writer. His life project has been to interrogate the notion of family.
The new generation of designers, like Prabal Gurung and Alexander Wang, have hundreds of thousands following them on social media who will probably never be able to afford their dresses but still feel a loyalty to them. So when that designer writes a book or launches a beauty line, they might pick that up.
I like to be good. I like being good at things. I wish that was valued instead of me being ‘better’ than another woman who also writes things and makes movies.
The great thing about using the past is that it gives you the most colossal freedom to invent. The research is necessary, of course, but no one writes a novel to dramatically illustrate what everybody already knows.
When Sonic Youth writes music, we write everything in a very communal way. It doesn’t matter who brought something in initially; it all gets transformed by the band.
I think Sia is a pretty good reference for me because her way of ‘singing and the way she composes the melodies and writes the lyrics is very similar to what I’ve always done.
Jack Thorne writes so well for messed-up teenage girls.
My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.
I keep a diary because I love this writer, David Sedaris, and he writes a lot about his diary, and he inspired me to keep one.
Inspiration comes from everything from the entire world, and it’s hard to pinpoint one thing. I can trace one inspiration to the writing of 13th-century Zen master Dogen Zenji, who writes beautifully about time.
A writer writes. Period. No matter if someone is buying your work or not.
I’ll tell you, Quentin Tarantino really writes the most amazing dialogue.
Nobody ever has a problem if a man writes a woman. I wanted to be able to say, ‘Well, I can write your men and your action, too. You don’t just have to give me the love scenes, which I don’t even think are my strong suit.’
When it comes to writing characters, whether men or women, I think a good writer writes good characters. I know many men who, for years, have written strong, progressive women characters.
Look, anything any writer writes is going to be on some level autobiographical. Part of the funny/sad thing is that you don’t always know how autobiographical you’re being.
The process, not the results, have to be the reason a writer writes. Otherwise, creating a four-hundred-page novel is just too daunting a task.
Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself.
The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.
Just because someone may or may not have someone that writes some words for them doesn’t mean that, A, they don’t have to kill it on the performance, and, B, they don’t have to have the ear for what’s tight and what’s not, which is something a lot of people don’t have.
Nas is an artist who writes from his heart.
I don’t know that I ‘look up’ to them, but in our predictably partisan media world, I admire journalists who are genuinely nonpartisan and totally fearless in their work – people who have no interest in being invited to the cocktail party. I don’t agree with everything he writes, but Glenn Greenwald comes to mind.
Everyone has their own career, their own fate, and everyone writes their own story.
The unique thing about Bob Marley, he writes what relates to everybody.
I really love being a weirdo who writes a lot of different things for a lot of different ages. I have been considering doing a guide on my website so that a reader who liked one of my books could find the other books that he or she might like, because I know some of the books are really different from the rest.
For someone who writes fiction, in order to activate the imagination and the unconscious, it’s essential to be free.
One thing Tolkien does incredibly well – and this is from a lay person’s point of view; I am not scholar or anything – is that you don’t have to make an effort to envisage the worlds that he writes about.
I think children love reading, and they will make time for it if we put the right books into their hands. And I hope I get the chance to keep being one of the people that writes them.
The poet does not know – often he will never know – whom he really writes for.
Lizz Wright, we call her lovingly ‘Amazing Grace.’ She has a folk and gospel kind of approach to the music, and she writes beautiful lyrics and songs. She’s like this balm that is really full and very rich and deep.
I can’t stand Anne Tyler books, but I gobble them up. It’s like Updike – I can’t stand him either, but I read everything he writes.
I’m one of those people who writes out words. All of my text messages? You can read them. Everyone would know what I’m trying to say. My sister will say ‘BTW.’ Do you mean ‘by the way’? Is that what you’re trying to say?
I’ve always considered myself a filmmaker who writes stuff for himself to do.
When I wrote my first album, I was reading Joseph Campbell – he’s this philosopher who writes about mythology. That inspired the title, ‘No Mythologies to Follow.’
It’s like, if you tweet anything about One Direction, you’ll get a lot of hate – immediately. They’re just searching the words and then writing back to anybody who writes about them.
Anyone who writes anything on any subject is standing on the shoulders of 900 people who’ve come before you.
I’ve always had such a high level of respect for Taylor Swift because she writes all of her music.
I belong to the Russian language. As to the state, from my point of view, the measure of a writer’s patriotism is not oaths from a high platform, but how he writes in the language of the people among whom he lives.
The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.
Everybody that writes has their own area of inquiry. And mine has always been kind of, why is it that when life can be so hard and difficult, we compound it by self-sabotage, doing terrible things? That’s always been my main area of inquiry, and it does lead you to dark places.
Through his long, productive career, Paul Theroux has mixed nonfiction books about exotic travel with novels set in exotic places. Africa, Singapore, Hong Kong, Honduras – he lives in and writes about places most of us never see.
One thing that I do want to say is Drake, as an artist, anybody has to respect him. He’s in the game, and he’s been in the game – he has longevity, even if he doesn’t write or writes his music.
Everyone writes in Tolstoy’s shadow, whether one feels oneself to be Tolstoyan or not.
Everything is autobiography, even if one writes something that is totally objective. The fact that it’s a subject that seizes you makes it autobiographical.
