I don't care who you are. When you sit down to write the first page of your screenplay, in your head, you're also writing your Oscar acceptance speech. Nora Ephron
I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer. Doris Lessing
I don't really get things very... intuitively. I mean, I don't immediately understand things. The only way I really get it is by writing it down. Joan Didion
I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story. Doris Lessing
I don't think there's a difference between writing for a newspaper or magazine and doing a chapter in a book. Rick Bragg
I don't usually think of my writing as a 'challenge' because I enjoy the process so much. I suppose that's what's helped me to avoid 'writer's block' all these years. Melody Carlson
I enjoy writing about people falling in love, probably because I think the first time you fall in love is the first time that you have to figure out how you're going to orient your life. What are you going to value? What's going to be most important to you? And I think that's really interesting to write about. John Green
I felt a failure because I couldn't sustain myself from what I earned from my writing. My day jobs were what mattered, and it was hard to even get those because universities wouldn't hire me as a real writer. Sandra Cisneros
I had wanted to be a novelist for so long, but I didn't have a story. That story came from the death of my father, and wrestling with how to help my mother. Writing it allowed me to work through my fears, frustrations and desires. I wanted control over the situation. And I wasn't sure I would have any in real life. Robert Crais
I have always used emotion as a writing tool. That goes back to me being on the stage. Anne McCaffrey
I have dictated stories from an airport after writing the story out in longhand on the plane that I got from phone interviews and then was applauded by editors for 'working magic.' Rick Bragg
I have yet to see a piece of writing, political or non-political, that doesn't have a slant. All writing slants the way a writer leans, and no man is born perpendicular, although many men are born upright. E.B.White
I have yet to see a piece of writing, political or non-political, that doesn't have a slant. All writing slants the way a writer leans, and no man is born perpendicular, although many men are born upright. E.B.White
I just sort of write the book I feel like writing given the emotional place I am in my life at the time. Bret Easton Ellis
I know a lot about writing, but I don't know much about how other industries work. I've tried to use my naivety to my advantage. Alain de Botton
I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don't know what I did before that. Just loafed I suppose. P. G. Wodehouse
I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it. Ernest Hemingway
I like the process of pencil and paper as opposed to a machine. I think the writing is better when it's done in handwriting. Nelson DeMille
I like to be surprised. Fresh implications and plot twists erupt as a story unfolds. Characters develop backgrounds, adding depth and feeling. Writing feels like exploring. David Brin