Favorite quotations - writing
There are some things which cannot
be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have,
must be paid heavily for their acquiring.
They are the very simplest things,
and because it takes a man’s life to know them
the little new that each man gets from life
is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave.
– Ernest Hemingway
(From A. E. Hotchner, Papa Hemingway, Random House, NY, 1966)
... we are pattern makers, and if our patterns are beautiful and full of grace, they will have the power to bring a person for whom the world has become chaotic and disorganized up from their knees and back to life.
- Barry Lopez
... I am fated to journey hand in hand with my strange heroes and to survey the surging immensity of life, to survey it through the laughter that all can see and through the tears unseen and unknown ..
~Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol (1809-04-01 – 1852-03-04, quote from Vol. I, ch. 7 - Dead Souls, 1842)
You can’t do ordinary stuff and expect unique results.
-- Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin
You have to have the three D’s: drive, discipline and desire. If you’re missing any one of those three, you can have all the talent in the world, but it’s going to be really hard to get anything done.
-- Nora Roberts
A writer — and, I believe, generally all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.
— Jorge Luis Borges
Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.
– Leo Tolstoy
People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
-- Maya Angelou
In writing, habit seems to be a much stronger force than either willpower or inspiration. Consequently there must be some little quality of fierceness until the habit pattern of a certain number of words is established. There is no possibility, in me at least, of saying, ‘I’ll do it if I feel like it.’ One never feels like awaking day after day. In fact, given the smallest excuse, one will not work at all. The rest is nonsense. Perhaps there are people who can work that way, but I cannot. I must get my words down every day whether they are any good or not.
— John Steinbeck
The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer.
– Billy Wilder (Filmmaker)
Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
– Kurt Vonnegut
The story is a machine for empathy. In contrast to logic or reason, a story is about emotion that gets staged over a sequence of dramatic moments, so you empathize with the characters without really thinking about it too much. It is a really powerful tool for imagining yourself in other people's situations.
-- Ira Glass
You must once and for all give up being worried about successes and failures. Don’t let that concern you. It’s your duty to go on working steadily day by day, quite steadily, to be prepared for mistakes, which are inevitable, and for failures.
— Anton Chekhov
Civilization is a heroic attempt to fit the confusion of human existence into the framework of a drama with a purpose.
– Mordecai M. Kaplan (from his diary, May 9, 1931)
It's hard to make something that's interesting. It's really, really hard. ... Basically, anything that anyone makes. ... It's like a law of nature, a law of aerodynamics, that anything that's written or anything that's created wants to be mediocre. The natural state of all writing is mediocrity. It's all tending toward mediocrity in the same way that all atoms are sort of dissipating out toward the expanse of the universe. ... So what it takes to make anything more than mediocre is such an act of will.
-- Ira Glass
There are some great quotes that I always keep in mind. One is the David Mamet quote "Who needs what from whom, and what will happen if they don’t get it?" The other is the Alexander Mackendrick quote, "What is happening now is never as interesting as the anticipation of what may or may not happen next." Those two things, I think about at the beginning of every single scene. And the scene is not good until you can address those two things.
— Sam Baron (From Go Into The Story interview, April 2015)
The stillness that is necessary to write, the act of silencing yourself, your cellphone, silencing everything to think, to bring words — there is something holy about it.
— Tamara Jenkins
He who does not understand the Will of God can never be a man of the higher type.
He who does not understand the inner law of self-control can never stand firm.
He who does not understand the force of words can never know his fellow-men.
— Confucius
We tell stories because we have a hollow place in our heart. You don’t fill that with success. You fill it by finding yourself in the stories you tell.
–Guillermo Del Toro (Filmmaker)
If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
When I am writing, I am trying to find out who I am, who we are, what we’re capable of, how we feel, how we lose and stand up, and go on from darkness into darkness. I’m trying for that. But I’m also trying for the language. I’m trying to see how it can really sound. I really love language. I love it for what it does for us, how it allows us to explain the pain and the glory, the nuances and delicacies of our existence. And then it allows us to laugh, allows us to show wit. Real wit is shown in language. We need language.
-- Maya Angelou
There are so many different kinds of writing and so many ways to work that the only rule is this: do what works. Almost everything has been tried and found to succeed for somebody. The methods, even the idea of successful writers contradict each other in a most heartening way, and the only element I find common to all successful writers is persistence — an overwhelming determination to succeed.
-- Sophy Burnham
You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.
– Jack London
It’s not where you take story ideas from - it’s where you take them to.
-- Jean-Luc Godard (Filmmaker, paraphrased)
If you see a movie that successfully puts yourself in the shoes of somebody different than yourself, you see the world differently. So I think the power of story is greater than the power of conversation, in a way.
–Jordan Peele (Filmmaker)
Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there.
If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time - or the tools - to write.
– Stephen King
The world doesn’t grieve when you’re grieving. The world goes on about its business. You’re having a good day and I’m having a bad one and vice versa. And they could be very good and very bad at the same time. You multiply that by seven billion and you have one element of the human experience.
–Kenneth Lonergan
You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait, just learn to become quiet, and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
– Franz Kafka
Creativity is essentially a lonely art. An even lonelier struggle. To some a blessing. To others a curse. It is in reality the ability to reach inside yourself and drag forth from your very soul an idea.
However great a man’s natural talent may be, the act of writing cannot be learned all at once.
– Jean Jacques Rousseau
writing = ass + chair
– Oliver Stone (Filmmaker)
The most important thing I’ve found about writing is that it is primarily an unconscious activity. What do I mean by this? I mean that a novel is larger than your head (or conscious mind). The connections, moods, metaphors, and experiences that you call up while writing will come from a place deep inside you. Sometimes you will wonder who wrote those words. Sometimes you will be swept up by a fevered passion relating a convoluted journey through your protagonist’s ragged heart. These moments are when you have connected to some deep place within you, a place that harbors the zeal that made you want to write to begin with. The way you get to this unconscious place is by writing every day. Or not even writing. Some days you may be rewriting, rereading, or just sitting there scrolling back and forth through the text. This is enough to bring you back into the dream of your story.
— Walter Mosley
Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life.
–Lawrence Kasdan
Don’t market yourself. Editors and readers don’t know what they want until they see it. Scratch what itches. Write what you need to write, feed the hunger for meaning in your life. Play at the serious questions of life and death.
Entertain yourself. Luck comes just as often (and just as rarely) to every writer. Don’t be the writer that got lucky doing something they hate.
– Dan Harmon
I’d just say to aspiring journalists or writers – who I meet a lot of – do it now.
Don’t wait for permission to make something that’s interesting or amusing to you. Just do it now. Don’t wait. Find a story idea, start making it, give yourself a deadline, show it to people who’ll give you notes to make it better.
Don’t wait till you’re older, or in some better job than you have now. Don’t wait for anything.
Don’t wait till some magical story idea drops into your lap. That’s not where ideas come from. Go looking for an idea and it’ll show up.
Begin now. Be a fucking soldier about it and be tough.
– Ira Glass
Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.
– Winston Churchill
The reality is that the single most important thing contributed by the screenwriter is the story structure.
— William Goldman
I am reminded of the professor who, in his declining hours, was asked by his devoted pupils for his final counsel. He replied, ‘Verify your quotations.'
– Winston Churchill
(It appears Churchill didn't remember the name of the professor:-)
Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius and power and magic in it.
– Johann Goethe
(John Anster’s translation of Faust)
(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.
(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
– George Orwell (from his essay ‘Politics and the English Language’ )
In rewriting what you have to be able to do is read a piece of material, say what’s wrong with it, know how to say what’s right with it, and then be able to do it yourself. That’s really what it comes down to. Some people say what’s wrong with something, some people can even say what’s right with it, and some people can do all three. But, you know, the more things that are required, the fewer people can do it. I think I can do it.
– Robert Towne
It’s only recently that I’ve come to understand that writers are not marginal to our society, that they, in fact, do all our thinking for us, that we are writing myths and our myths are believed, and that old myths are believed until someone writes a new one.
– Kurt Vonnegut
The construction is the most important thing. It’s like building a house – you have to build the outside properly before you put the bits and pieces inside afterward. Get your story, get your architecture right, and you can always add your dialogue afterwards.
— Charles Bennett
There is, I hope, a thesis in my work: we may encounter many defeats, but we must not be defeated. That sounds goody-two-shoes, I know, but I believe that a diamond is the result of extreme pressure and time. Less time is crystal. Less than that is coal. Less than that is fossilized leaves. Less than that it’s just plain dirt. In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics, the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that we may encounter many defeats -- maybe it’s imperative that we encounter the defeats -- but we are much stronger than we appear to be and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be.
-- Maya Angelou
Basically, my writing’s like a journey. I’ll know some of the stops ahead of time, and I’ll make some of those stops and some of them I won’t. Some will be a moot point by the time I get there. You know every script will have four to six basic scenes that you’re going to do. It’s all the scenes in the middle that you’ve got to -- not struggle, it’s never a struggle -- but you’ve got to write through -- that’s where your characters really come from.
— Quentin Tarantino (Filmmaker)
I really think the mark of experience isn’t the ability to write a lot of good pages, it’s the ability to generate shitty pages faster without worrying so much about it.
Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.
– Stephen King
The funny thing about it all is that literary talent isn’t rare. Lots of people can write good stories with good characters and great sentences.
What’s rare is the stubborn, pragmatic thing that tells you ‘I’ve got to do this every single fucking day, even when I don’t want to do it, when I’d rather pluck my eyes out and feed them to the birds.’ That discipline combined with talent is very rare. I’d be willing to bet that some of the most brilliant writers who ever lived have never been published, because they weren’t prepared to do the work. You have to make sacrifices and be utterly selfish. Everything else and everyone else is secondary to your writing.
— Kevin Barry (quoted on GITS)
When I’m thinking about these more abstract, philosophical questions, I start thinking about scenarios that might dramatize them, and then about how these scenarios might play out, and then I come up with an ending I like — that’s when I know I can write a story about it. I always need to have the ending in mind first. Usually the first thing I write is a paragraph from the end of the story and I keep that as a destination in mind when I’m making up the rest. Everything else is building toward that destination. So the specifics of the characters come about as a means to get to the ending I want.
– Ted Chiang
I’m not here for the money, I’m not here for the job, I’m here because I want things. I think that I have something to express, so I didn’t care about the money.
I remember the day I was going to release Amores Perros, the day before I had a chat with a friend of mine, a screenwriter, who made a lot of concessions with his screenplay to make it commercial. I said, ‘Man, why did you make so many concessions to your screenplay, it was beautiful, now I cannot even recognize it.’ He said, ‘Because my friend, I’m going to be in Hollywood. Your shitty, arty movie about dogs is going to be seen by two people. Mine is going to bring me to Hollywood!’ No, my friend, that’s not the way it works. First of all you don’t have any will over the work. What I mean by this is you cannot decide if it’s going to be a success or not. There’s no way of deciding that. There’s no progress in art, your last work is not going to be better than your first work. So the best thing is to be authentic and honest with your own work.
— Guillermo Arriaga
That’s the part that keeps people back the most—it’s like, ‘Well I don’t have an idea, so I can’t start.’ No, it’s like you only get the idea once you start. It’s this totally reverse thing. You have to act first before inspiration will hit.
— Robert Rodriguez (Filmmaker)
The feeling of finishing the ... first draft, was the high. Everything that followed ... could never match the idea of having just taken your story and racked your brain, finally having it on paper in a version you’re willing to tolerate ... I didn’t get into that whole money thing ... It just seemed a little phony to me. It won’t make my life fulfilled. Because all the money does is buy the bed. Getting out of it is the problem.
— Shane Black
... you really have to shove and grunt and sweat ... you go to your office and you’re the only one who shows up, none of the characters show up, and you sit there by yourself, feeling like an idiot ... You have to show up at your office every day. If an idea comes by, you want to be there to get it in.
-- Thomas Harris
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.
-- George Orwell
I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.
― Franz Kafka