Some new quotes from CS Weekly...
EDIT - New Quotes Added!
"English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education -- sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across the street."
- E.B. White
"There are some books that refuse to be written. They stand their ground year after year and will not be persuaded. It isn't because the book is not there and worth being written -- it is only because the right form of the story does not present itself. There is only one right form for a story and if you fail to find that form the story will not tell itself."
- Mark Twain
"Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self."
- Cyril Connolly
"Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it."
- David Sedaris
"In Hollywood, defining the content of a movie is like sex-- everyone thinks they can do it and do it well. And they're not inclined to give up the chance to do it just so someone else can do it."
- Terry Rossio
"Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public."
- Winston Churchill
"I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter."
– James Michener
"A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer."
–Karl Kraus
"Physics gives you a craving for elegance that I think has a parallel in storytelling, where you understand that you can lard up a story with a lot of complications, but it has to have a single spine that you love."
– Leverage co-creator John Rogers
"One of the obligations of the writer is to say or sing all that he or she can, to deal with as much of the world as becomes possible to him or her in language."
– Denise Levertov
"People at their best I don't really want to watch in entertainment. I don't really want to watch mature people or smart people or people who do the right thing. I like to meet them in life, but I don't find them entertaining. And certainly not funny."
– Funny People's Judd Apatow
"Practice, practice, practice writing. Writing is a craft that requires both
talent and acquired skills. You learn by doing, by making mistakes and then seeing where you went wrong."
– Jeffrey A. Carver
"People want to put women in one box, and I'm interested in how women can be everything at once. She can be a slut who wants to fall in love, or she can party too much, but she's still very smart. I want to expand the vocabulary."
– Liz Meriwether, one of Variety's "10 Screenwriters to Watch"
"I just write scenes that are funny to me, and think: How do I string these together in the structure of a movie? And making sure there's enough characters that I like that if I get bored with one -- which happens constantly, because I have a short attention span -- I can move on to another."
– The Office's Mindy Kaling
"One thing about writing movies: It's different every time. When I finish a script and sit down to write a new one, I have to learn it all over again. Every single thing is completely different; there are no rules. As soon as you start to follow rules, your stuff becomes formulaic. Then you can forget about it."
– John Hughes, 1950 - 2009
"I'd like to be remembered as someone who used their ability as a novelist or as a dramatist to say the things he felt needed to be said about the society [while being] as entertaining as possible. Because if you don't entertain, nobody's listening."
– Budd Schulberg, 1914 - 2009
"You can't wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club."
– Jack London
"There are so many different kinds of writing and so many ways to work that the only rule is this: do what works. Almost everything has been tried and found to succeed for somebody. The methods, even the ideas of successful writers, contradict each other in a most heartening way, and the only element I find common to all successful writers is persistence -- an overwhelming determination to succeed."
– Sophy Burnham
"The story…must be a conflict, and specifically, a conflict between the forces of good and evil within a single person."
– Maxwell Anderson
"People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad."
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
"It's better to write about things you feel than about things you know about."
– L.P. Hartley
"Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed."
– Leo Rosten
"It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop."
– Vita Sackville-West
"Words -- so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them."
– Nathaniel Hawthorne
"Anyone who believes you can't change history has never tried to write his memoirs."
– David Ben Gurion
"The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it."
– Elizabeth Drew
"In science there is a dictum: don't add an experiment to an experiment. Don't make things unnecessarily complicated. In writing fiction, the more fantastic the tale, the plainer the prose should be. Don't ask your readers to admire your words when you want them to believe your story."
– Ben Bova
"The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life."
– Robert Penn Warren
"If you're not failing every now and again, it's a sign you're not doing anything very innovative."
– Woody Allen
"The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless
if he is a good one... If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is worth any number of old ladies."
– William Faulkner
"So often is the virgin sheet of paper more real than what one has to say, and so often one regrets having marred it."
– Harold Acton
"A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket."
– Charles Peguy
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