All Quotes

When I write a scientific treatise, I might reach 100 people. When the 'National Geographic' covers a project, it communicates about plants and fish and underwater technology to more than 10 million people.
‐‐ Sylvia Earle

When I write a screenplay - and I think this is true for a lot of people - you direct the movie. That's what writing a screenplay is.
‐‐ John Patrick Shanley

When I write a screenplay, and when I direct, I always pull lines out.
‐‐ Stanley Tucci

When I write a song and come up with an arrangement and a vocal part, it's always a challenge trying to find a singer who can interpret it sort of the way that I hear it, and it's a very difficult thing to do. I mean, singing is like playing an instrument - everybody does it a little bit different - singing maybe even more so.
‐‐ Tom Scholz

When I write a song, I always start on acoustic guitar, because that's a good test of a song, when it's really open and bare. You can often mislead yourself if you start with computers and samples and programming because you can disguise a bad song.
‐‐ Martin Gore

When I write a song, I tap into the emotion and the feeling and then I use the emotion to write the words. It's the opposite when I act. I use the words and tap into the emotion.
‐‐ Jill Scott

When I write a song, it is to fill a niche in people's lives. To have a song for every experience if one hadn't been written yet.
‐‐ Bill Callahan

When I write a song, it's all about the riff - the riff first, then the words come later.
‐‐ Evan Dando

When I write a story, I have no idea what I'm doing. All I know is that I want to share something with my readers. The whole idea of writing is this place where you lose control, where you're irresponsible - it's a very liberating place.
‐‐ Etgar Keret

When I write a tune - and it's been like this for many years - I always hear in the back of my head some sort of vague, orchestrated, fully fleshed-out big-band version of the song with other parts going on.
‐‐ John Scofield

When I write a word in English, a simple one, such as, say, 'chief,' I have unwittingly ushered a querulous horde into the room. The Roman legionary is there, shaking his cap, or head, and Andy Capp is there, slouching in his signature working man's headgear.
‐‐ Geraldine Brooks

When I write about a 15-year old, I jump, I return to the days when I was that age. It's like a time machine. I can remember everything. I can feel the wind. I can smell the air. Very actually. Very vividly.
‐‐ Haruki Murakami

When I write about animals, I use anthropological techniques and the language you would use for a person. You don't have to anthropomorphize animals, just acknowledge their individuality.
‐‐ Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

When I write about my childhood I think, oh my God, how did I ever get from there to here? Not that any great thing has happened to me. But I felt so tiny, so lost.
‐‐ Paul Theroux

When I write an email where I outlined a whole scene, it just came out of my unconscious, it comes from a deeper place. The same thing happens when the actors go, take after take, and just get lost in it. When you're in a house, you don't think about being in the house; you're just there.
‐‐ David O. Russell

When I write an original story I write about people I know first-hand and situations I'm familiar with. I don't write stories about the nineteenth century.
‐‐ Satyajit Ray

When I write and develop things myself, I might work for a while on a script from a book, and then I go back and read the book and go back into it to see if I lost something: is there something there?
‐‐ Baltasar Kormakur

When I write books, I've learned not to have any expectations that I'm going to change the world.
‐‐ Jon Krakauer

When I write down my thoughts, they do not escape me. This action makes me remember my strength which I forget at all times. I educate myself proportionately to my captured thought. I aim only to distinguish the contradiction between my mind and nothingness.
‐‐ Comte de Lautreamont

When I write fiction, I have the illusion of being able to control these fictional worlds and these characters, and to make them say what I want them to say. Of course, the problem is that it is an illusion, and by the end of it you realize that you're not in control of it at all; the characters have taken over, and they're driving the vehicle.
‐‐ Ruth Ozeki

When I write fiction, I never try to deliver a message; I just want to tell a story. But I admit that I want the story to be memorable and the characters to touch the reader's heart.
‐‐ Isabel Allende

When I write for kids, I have to make sure they know what can't happen. They have to know it's a fantasy. But when I write for adults, they have to think it's real. Every detail has to be real or they won't buy it.
‐‐ R. L. Stine

When I write for 'n+1,' I begin by doing a lot of reading, to try to convince myself I'm not stupid. Then I scribble down a paragraph here, a paragraph there, when a notion strikes. Then I see if I can arrange those notions in a way that yields an argument.
‐‐ Chad Harbach

When I write from the point of view of a child or a young person, I am trying to tell the truth as an adult voice sometimes cannot. We are so often wrapped in the garment of trying to reassure ourselves that we are not afraid.
‐‐ Michael Cadnum

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
‐‐ John Updike

When I write, I am not giving a lecture, I am speculating on behavior. Sometimes this is dangerous, but it should be. As I say often, theatre is a dark place and we should keep the light out of it.
‐‐ Howard Barker

When I write, I can shake off all my cares.
‐‐ Anne Frank

When I write, I create really absurd situations which become false because I am after the joke.
‐‐ Sally Phillips

When I write, I don't allow the fear of consequences to interfere with the writing process. I have in the past paid for my commitment to the truth and the way I live my life. I am prepared to pay more if I have to.
‐‐ Taslima Nasrin

When I write, I don't have any expectation of what kind of song it will become or who it might reach.
‐‐ Macklemore

When I write, I don't like to be around any humans.
‐‐ Jim Harrison

When I write, I don't really focus on duets or anything like that or whether I'm going to feature this or that rapper. I just focus on just making a great song and figure out the rest later.
‐‐ John Legend

When I write, I enjoy myself so much that what is being written really needs no reader.
‐‐ Guillermo Cabrera Infante

When I write, I feel that I'm writing with my intellect. When I paint, I think it's some other force making me paint. I - as I wrote in my novel 'My Name is Red' - watch with amazement what my hand is doing on the paper, what kind of line, what kind of strange, beautiful thing it's doing in spite of my will, so to speak.
‐‐ Orhan Pamuk

When I write I find a quiet place.
‐‐ Lianne La Havas

When I write, I get glimpses into future novels.
‐‐ Patricia Briggs

When I write, I have a sort of secret kinship of readers in all countries who don't know each other but each of whom, when they read my book, feels at home in it. So I write for those readers. It's almost a sense of writing for a specific person, but it's a specific person who I don't know.
‐‐ Teju Cole

When I write, I have always tried to be on the side of the weak. The side of the powerful is not literature's side.
‐‐ Elfriede Jelinek

When I write, I imagine places more than people.
‐‐ Paula Hawkins

When I write, I imagine scenes. I write things down. I take photographs. I do some casting. I rewrite. It's a permanent making or remaking.
‐‐ Pawel Pawlikowski

When I write, I just let my characters go, the way I let life go.
‐‐ Carolyn Chute

When I write, I keep the family audience in mind. I ensure there's no vulgarity, as families are coming into the theatres, and there's no blood and gore because of the kids. There is a set of people who doesn't like my cinema, but there's a bigger group that likes the kind of movies I make.
‐‐ Rohit Shetty

When I write I know that I'm going to have to produce 40 percent more than I need.
‐‐ George Saunders

When I write, I lose time. I'm happy in a way that I have a hard time finding in real life. The intimacy between my brain and my fingers and my computer... Yet knowing that that intimacy will find an audience... It's very satisfying. It's like having the safety of being alone with the ego reward of being known.
‐‐ Jill Soloway

When I write, I'm constantly putting myself in the position of someone else as I write using myriad voices; I think that's a life skill all people should learn.
‐‐ Joanne Harris

When I write, I'm not trying to be funny. It's the way I look at the world.
‐‐ Billy Collins

When I write, I'm sort of old-fashioned in the sense that I like to write something that I feel I could just perform alone, obviously, because I do that a lot in concert.
‐‐ Sondre Lerche

When I write, I'm still imagining a kid reading it on paper. I read e-books when I travel, but in general I still prefer holding an old-fashioned book in my hands. There's a special, tactile experience.
‐‐ Rick Riordan

When I write, I make decent money doing it, but I don't wake up dreaming about writing.
‐‐ Grant Heslov