All Quotes

If you write a book that's as powerful and successful as 'Bastard,' there's a strong desire to prove there's something else.
‐‐ Dorothy Allison

If you write a bunch of different characters with a bunch of different opinions, you end up with these long scenes of everyone standing around talking.
‐‐ Michael Arndt

If you write a good action sequence well in a novel, you're already writing it for film, because the only way to do it well is to use some of the same tricks. They're rhetorical, not visual, but it's the same move.
‐‐ Justin Cronin

If you write a hit song for Britney Spears, it's worth several million dollars. Just one song! And it might have taken you two hours to do it. It's like mining for gold. It takes a lot of skill and a lot of technique.
‐‐ Jewel

If you write a letter of resignation or something with an agenda, you're simply using a pen to record what you have thought out. In a poem, the pen is more like a flashlight, a Geiger counter, or one of those metal detectors that people walk around beaches with.
‐‐ Billy Collins

If you write a lovely story about India, you're criticized for selling an exotic version of India. And if you write critically about India, you're seen as portraying it in a negative light - it also seems to be a popular way to present India, sort of mangoes and beggars.
‐‐ Kiran Desai

If you write a movie for Roger Corman, it's going to get made. You saw it almost the next day.
‐‐ John Sayles

If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account.
‐‐ V. S. Naipaul

If you write a novel where war is nothing but hell and no one experiences excitement or cracks a dark joke, then you're not actually admitting the full experience.
‐‐ Phil Klay

If you write a song, and you go into a restaurant, and there's a guy with a piano singing and he's playing piano, singing your song, or you hear it at a wedding or at an airport... it's fun!
‐‐ Jesse Harris

If you write a story based on a real person, you're trapped by the details of the real person and his life. It gets in the way of writing your own story.
‐‐ Caroline B. Cooney

If you write an original, it's like you went in and dug a well, and you hit oil. But an adaptation, it's like the oil well's on fire, and they bring you in to put the fire out and get it working again - or something like that.
‐‐ Brian Helgeland

If you write chick lit, and if you're a New Yorker, and if your book becomes the topic of pop-culture fascination, the paper might make dismissive and ignorant mention of your book. If you write romance, forget about it. You'll be lucky if they spell your name right on the bestseller list.
‐‐ Jennifer Weiner

If you write enough, you begin to learn to do things. But in a way, you do start from zero each time.
‐‐ James Salter

If you write fiction, you have to love your characters. It's like your family. You don't have to like them, but you have to love them.
‐‐ Douglas Coupland

If you write fiction, you're by yourself. There are certain advantages to that in that you don't have to explain anything to anybody. But when you get in with others who share the loneliness of the whole enterprise, you're not lonely anymore.
‐‐ Denis Johnson

If you write genre fiction, you follow the rules, and you have to follow them because readers expect that.
‐‐ Yann Martel

If you write great songs with meaning and emotion, they will last for ever because songs are the key to everything. Songs will outlast the artist and they will go on for ever if they are good.
‐‐ Elton John

If you write in category, you write knowing there's a framework, there are reader expectations.
‐‐ Nora Roberts

If you write interesting roles, you get interesting people to play them. If you write roles that are full of nuance and contradiction and have interesting dialog, actors are drawn to that.
‐‐ Paul Schrader

If you write memoir, it can't be about blame or hurt; it has to be creative.
‐‐ Dani Shapiro

If you write nonfiction, a historical account of what really happened, first of all, it's always white men who do that, and you don't have the voices that are really interesting to me, of the people who are not sheltered by the big umbrella of the establishment.
‐‐ Isabel Allende

If you write, produce and direct, you own things and see them through to the end.
‐‐ Johnny Vegas

If you write really good material, the rest just falls into place. There's really no trick to it.
‐‐ Seth Grahame-Smith

If you write satire, the guilty pleasure these days is that there's just so much material about. On the other hand, if you have a family it can be depressing.
‐‐ Carl Hiaasen

If you write something, and you believe in it, you'd like to see sixty million people moved by it.
‐‐ Nelson Algren

If you write something down on paper, it becomes an actual goal. Before you write it down, it's a thought, a dream that may or may not get done.
‐‐ Summer Sanders

If you write something that gets a bad response, or someone commits candor or is off message, there are often consequences almost immediately when it appears in the paper or a magazine, that somebody gets called into the boss's office. And sometimes it can result in a loss of access for the reporter.
‐‐ Ron Suskind

If you write something that's personal, there's going to be elements of yourself in it.
‐‐ Lisa Cholodenko

If you write something the White House doesn't like, they take you in and say, 'If you ever write something like you did today, nobody from the White House will ever talk to you again,'
‐‐ Ron Suskind

If you write songs and if you write music that's very sincere and very honest, it's pop music, but it is pop music with a lot of honesty and a lot of heart.
‐‐ Jon Secada

If you write songs you have an idea how they're going to sound.
‐‐ Fred Frith

If you write thrillers or mysteries or horror fiction or quote-unquote speculative fiction, men might read you, and the 'Times' might notice you.
‐‐ Jennifer Weiner

If you write your own tools, you can sort of see new things, design new things.
‐‐ Saul Griffith

If you wrote a novel in South Africa which didn't concern the central issues, it wouldn't be worth publishing.
‐‐ Alan Paton

If you wrote something, you deserve to get paid and recognized for your work. No one should take a bow with another man's hat.
‐‐ Ronald Isley

If you yell about one woman, you're not a misogynist. If I yell about Michelle Bachman, that doesn't make me a misogynist. If I compare all women to Michelle Bachman, then I'm a misogynist.
‐‐ Lewis Black

If you young fellows were wise, the devil couldn't do anything to you, but since you aren't wise, you need us who are old.
‐‐ Martin Luther

If Youku had adopted YouTube's business model, we just would not be here. We would not exist.
‐‐ Victor Koo

If young children boo me, that makes my day.
‐‐ Tom Felton

If younger people see older people who haven't planned ahead and have to rely on charity, the young will be more likely to provide for the future. Today when someone plans poorly, the only consequence people see is a demand for more government.
‐‐ Harry Browne

If your access to health care involves your leaving work and driving somewhere and parking and waiting for a long time, that's not going to promote healthiness.
‐‐ Larry Page

If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.
‐‐ John Quincy Adams

If your agent or publisher is jumping up and down at the thought of your novel, it's because they're picturing the movie poster on the side of the bus.
‐‐ Dave Morris

If your album sells, that's cool, more people find out about you, more people get turned on to what we're really about-which is a live rock and roll band.
‐‐ Nikki Sixx

If your appraisal comes back too low - you don't have at least 10% equity for a conforming loan or 20% for a jumbo loan - you might not be able to refinance at all, at least with a loan that's packaged and sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. That means you may have to pay a much higher rate.
‐‐ Jean Chatzky

If your audience is young, it'd be youth culture, if your audience is older, it'd be older people, if it were senior citizens, it'd be senior citizen issues. So you try and hit the target audience.
‐‐ Kurt Loder

If your bank took bailout money, take your money out of that bank and put it in a credit union. Credit unions are owned by the people who have their money in the credit union.
‐‐ Michael Moore

If your basic premise about the fundamental purpose of our government is that it must provide for the common defense, then no other position is possible.
‐‐ Don Nickles