All Quotes

If you're writing a screenplay for a feature, you don't have any involvement with the casting process, the editing process, the set design, the costume design, or any of that stuff.
‐‐ David Benioff

If you're writing a screenplay from scratch, it involves a lot of creation.
‐‐ Philippe Falardeau

If you're writing a screenplay, you need to be prepared to let go: there's a good chance the words you write aren't going to be the ones that end up on screen.
‐‐ Meg Cabot

If you're writing a song, you have to write something that can be understood serially. When you're reading a poem that's written for the page, your eye can skip up and down. You can see the thing whole. But you're not going to see the thing whole in the song. You're going to hear it in series, and you can't skip back.
‐‐ James Fenton

If you're writing a thriller, mystery, Western or adventure-driven book, you'd better keep things moving rapidly for the reader. Quick pacing is vital in certain genres. It hooks readers, creates tension, deepens the drama, and speeds things along.
‐‐ Nancy Kress

If you're writing about angry people, you use the language of anger. If you're writing about desperate people, you use the language of desperation.
‐‐ Chris Crutcher

If you're writing an opinion piece, it's your job to write your opinion. If, on the other hand, you wrote a novel, as Virginia Woolf tells us, it would be inappropriate if you let your novel be influenced by your political opinions.
‐‐ David Mamet

If you're writing anything decent, it's in you, it's your spirit coming out. If it's not an expression of how a person genuinely feels, then it's not a good song done with any conviction.
‐‐ Alex Chilton

If you're writing fantasy or science fiction, it's really hard to do if you don't know a lot, at least in a basic way, about how the real world works.
‐‐ Tad Williams

If you're writing, it means getting up and writing all day, and if you're filming, it's getting up and filming all day. I get up, go to my computer, write, turn it off, and go to bed. That is a Clarkson day.
‐‐ Jeremy Clarkson

If you're writing, you're starting in private. It can really be this amazing, private, freeing experience. Forget that it's for other people - that comes in later.
‐‐ Lena Dunham

If you're yelling you're the one who's lost control of the conversation.
‐‐ Taylor Swift

If you're young and wild, you tend to believe your clippings. One day you're Hemingway. The next day you're nothing.
‐‐ Peter Benchley

If you're young enough, any kind of writing you do for a short period of time is a marvelous apprenticeship.
‐‐ Irwin Shaw

If you read a book about school - someone else's book - you always translate it into your own school experiences. It's describing the student: he's bewildered and lost in a large crowd in a university classroom. You'll visualize that from your own experiences. So, everything you know is what you're really writing.
‐‐ James Salter

If you read a book that's fiction and you get caught in the characters and the plot, and swept away, really, by the fiction of it - by the non-reality - you sometimes wind up changing your reality as well. Often, when the last page is turned, it will haunt you.
‐‐ Jodi Picoult

If you read a lot of books you are considered well read. But if you watch a lot of TV, you're not considered well viewed.
‐‐ Lily Tomlin

If you read a lot of books, you're considered well-read. But if you watch a lot of TV, you're not considered well-viewed.
‐‐ Lily Tomlin

If you read a lot of Chinese literature, there has always been very strong women figures - warriors, swordswomen - who defended honor and loyalty with the men. So, it's not new to our culture - it's always been very much a part of it. It's good that now the Western audience would have a different image of the Chinese women.
‐‐ Michelle Yeoh

If you read a story with an 'I' or a 'he' or a 'she,' you're in familiar territory - but 'we' is mostly unexplored. I think of 'we' as an adventure.
‐‐ Steven Millhauser

If you read about Mussolini or Stalin or some of these other great monsters of history, they were at it all the time, that they were getting up in the morning very early. They were physically very active. They didn't eat lunch.
‐‐ A. N. Wilson

If you read about the astronauts who went to the moon - the 12 who walked on it, and the others who orbited - all suffered serious mental trauma of one kind or another.
‐‐ James Gray

If you read all the time what other people have done, you will the think the way they thought.
‐‐ Richard Hamming

If you read all your history books, there are no women in them.
‐‐ Caitlin Moran

If you read any of my books, they tend to have a strong historical perspective.
‐‐ Eric Kandel

If you read back in the Bible, the letter of the apostle Paul to the church of Thessalonia, he said that in the latter days before the end of the age that the Earth would be caught up in what he called the birth pangs of a new order.
‐‐ Pat Robertson

If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.
‐‐ C. S. Lewis

If you read in front of your kids, it's very likely that they'll become readers, too.
‐‐ John Lithgow

If you read Islamic creationist literature, it's pretty much lifted from American evangelical literature.
‐‐ Richard Dawkins

If you read Keats's poems, they're often full of doubts and anxieties. They can be quite tough.
‐‐ Jane Campion

If you read literature, you put yourself in somebody else's shoes. You learn from great figures in literature.
‐‐ Jim Leach

If you read 'Lord of the Rings' and dismiss it as a lie because it has orcs and elves, you're missing the whole point of the story. If children don't have to be concerned about strangers because there's no such thing as a Big Bad Wolf dressed like Granny, you're missing the point.
‐‐ Doug TenNapel

If you read novels of the 19th century, they're pretty experimental. They take lots of chances; they seem to break a lot of rules. You've got omniscient narrators lecturing at times to the reader in first person. If you go back to the earliest novels, this is happening to a wild extent, like 'Tristram Shandy' or 'Don Quixote'.
‐‐ Jennifer Egan

If you read our Founding Fathers, people like Benjamin Franklin and Jefferson - what we're doing now in this country is making them roll over in their graves.
‐‐ Rick Santelli

If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.
‐‐ M. H. Abrams

If you read Shakespeare's stage directions, all the gore and violence is right in there.
‐‐ Teller

If you read somebody's diary, you get what you deserve.
‐‐ David Sedaris

If you read the 'Daily Mail,' you would imagine that the British middle classes lead lives of unremitting misery.
‐‐ Simon Hoggart

If you read the fables, 'Beowulf,' for example, you will know something about the person who writes them, and I like that. Secondly, they will not be about individuals; they will be about community. Thirdly, they're all about moralizing. Fourthly, the way they express themselves takes its tone from the oral tradition.
‐‐ Jim Crace

If you read the first page of one of my novels, I can guarantee that you will read the last one. This isn't just social commentary. This is also about writing good page-turners. I want people to keep reading.
‐‐ Jodi Picoult

If you read the history of the national Socialist party, they're all people who felt like life should have been better to them. They're disappointed, vengeful, angry.
‐‐ Alan Furst

If you read the memoirs of slave-owning families, you'd be hard pressed to find evidence of black people in the lives of the whites, even though for most of the time on the plantations black people outnumbered whites by a ratio of seven to one.
‐‐ Edward Ball

If you read the poets of the 19th century in Latin America, you would see that Havana or Mexico City or Buenos Aires are incredibly modern and global cities that they were not. And eventually they became real, and they became real because people read these books and tried to live in a better world.
‐‐ Alvaro Enrigue

If you read the Senate rules, there are provisions where the Senate parliamentarian can be overridden.
‐‐ Bill Flores

If you read the whole Vertigo 'Animal Man' series of 89 issues or whatever, each writer has a completely different take on his origin. If you try to put them all together, they contradict one another. I had to pick and choose to make up a new origin that makes sense to new readers.
‐‐ Jeff Lemire

If you real desire is to be good, there is no need to wait for the money before you do it; you can do it now, this very moment, and just where you are.
‐‐ James Allen

If you realize all the time what's kind of wonderful - that is, if we expand our experience into wilder and wilder regions of experience - every once in a while, we have these integrations when everything's pulled together into a unification, in which it turns out to be simpler than it looked before.
‐‐ Richard P. Feynman

If you realize early what your influence is, you can have a better understanding of what you are writing about.
‐‐ Alexi Zentner

If you realize that all things change, there is nothing you will try to hold on to. If you are not afraid of dying, there is nothing you cannot achieve.
‐‐ Lao Tzu

If you realize too acutely how valuable time is, you are too paralyzed to do anything.
‐‐ Katharine Butler Hathaway