Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he's there, he's not really there.
Paul Auster
You sell a screenplay like you sell a car. If somebody drives it off a cliff, that's it.
Rita Mae Brown
Screenwriting," she once said, "is like writing in the sand with the wind blowing."
Frances Marion
We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.
Anaïs Nin
hear and I forget; I see and I remember; I write and I understand.
Chinese proverb
Writing is so difficult that I often feel that writers, having had their hell on earth, will escape all punishment thereafter
Jessamyn West
Writing is so difficult that I often feel that writers, having had their hell on earth, will escape all punishment thereafter
Jessamyn West
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.
Robert Frost
I shall live bad if I do not write and I shall write bad if I do not live.
Francoise Sagan
The first draft of everything is shit.
Ernest Hemingway
As a writer, I need an enormous amount of time alone. Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It's a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write. Having anybody watching that or attempting to share it with me would be grisly.
Paul Rudnick
Writing is easy. All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.
Gene Fowler
Lindsay Doran (producer), James Schamus (co-producer), Ang Lee (director) and I had met previously this month to discuss the latest draft of the script, which is what we're all here to work through... Lindsay goes round the table and introduces everyone -- making it clear that I am present in the capacity of "writer" rather than actress, therefore no one has to be nice to me.
Emma Thompson
A movie is not a book. If the source material is a book, you cannot be too respectful of the book. All you owe to the book is the spirit. Everything else-- just tear that motherfucker apart.
Richard Price
They have followed their usual procedure and handed my treatment over to several other people to make a screenplay out of it. By the time they are ready to shoot it may have been through 20 pairs of hands. What will be left? One shudders to think. Meanwhile, they have paid me a lot of money...
Aldous Huxley
Listen carefully, shake your head thoughtfully, then leave them in the dark... where you found them.
Jack Sowards
on listening to the meanderings of studio development executives
Writers are lucky. Whatever the mood, no matter the longing, the writer can use his words to connect himself to any world he wishes to visit.
Alan Zweibel
from "Bunny Bunny: Gilda Radner: A Sort of Love Story."
A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
Thomas Mann
Write without pay until someone offers pay. If nobody offers within three years, the candidate may look upon this as a sign that sawing wood is what he was intended for.
Mark Twain
People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Writers write about what obsesses them.
Anne Rice
Anybody can become a writer, but the trick is to STAY a writer.
Harlan Ellison
Writing is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living.
Catherine Drinker Bowen
The writer is by nature a dreamer-- a conscious dreamer.
Carson McCullers
A writer is a controlled schizophrenic.
Edward Albee
Writing is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to those who have none.
Jules Renard
Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.
Jules Renard
Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.
Jules Renard
Having imagination, it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that, if you were unimaginative, would take you only a minute. Or you might not write the paragraph at all.
Franklin P. Adams, Half a Loaf (1927)
The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.
Oscar Wilde
if writers were good businessmen, they'd have too much sense to be writers.
Irvin S. Cobb
The dubious privilege of a freelance writer is he's given the freedom to starve anywhere.
S.J. Perelman
I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.
Peter De Vries
