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It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.
No writer has ever yet been known to hang himself as long as he had another chapter left.
Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.
If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.
Every writer with half a brain knows to surround himself or herself with editors who are smarter, far more articulate and infinitely better looking.
Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.
Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.
To me, movies and music go hand in hand. When I’m writing a script, one of the first things I do is find the music I’m going to play for the opening sequence.
In Hollywood, the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.
If the sex scene doesn’t make you want to do it — whatever it is they’re doing — it hasn’t been written right.
Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.
Keep a small can of WD-40 on your desk — away from any open flames — to remind yourself that if you don’t write daily, you will get rusty.
If you haven’t got an idea, start a story anyway. You can always throw it away, and maybe by the time you get to the fourth page you will have an idea, and you’ll only have to throw away the first three pages.
I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.


























