Regie Routman Writing Quotes

The one thing a lifetime in the newspaper business teaches you is pace - you spend all your time trying to make sure that the reader's going to finish what you're writing. ~ Carl Hiaasen

And then, movie-wise, I'm writing a couple of things. They're all comedies. It's the only way I know. I'm also being sent scripts, which is really nice, kind of off the back of this, so I don't necessarily have to generate my own stuff. I'm just looking for something that's explosively funny and relatable in equal measure. ~ Dan Mazer

I am writing to all the churches to let it be known that I will gladly die for God if only you do not stand in my way ... Let me be food for the wild beasts, for they are my way to God. ~ Ignatius Of Antioch

When you write for children, don't write for children.
Write from the child in you. ~ Charles Ghigna

That's the whole point of writing to me - I put my characters under incredible duress, and from that comes their truth. In a way, I'm using them to try to find my own answers in life. ~ R.A. Salvatore

The little box that was given to me was by no means unique. I'd heard of prayer boxes, and I knew what they were for.
... Any scrap of paper will do, anywhere, anytime of the day or night. The important part, in a world of fractured thoughts, hurried moments, and scattershot prayers, is to take the time to think through, to write down, to clarify in your own mind the things you're asking for, the things you're grateful for, the things your're troubled about, the hopes you've been nurturing.
And then?
Put them in the box and ...
Let. Them. Go.
That's what trust is. It's letting go of the worry. It's the way of peace and also the way of God. such a hard road to travel for people like me, who are worriers. When I'm writing a story, I control the whole universe. In life ... not so much. Actually, not at all. Things happen that I hadn't anticipated and wouldn't choose and can't change. That's the tough part. ~ Lisa Wingate

Don't be didactic - don't write about poverty. Write about poor people. When you dramatize their lives and let life and characters be your inspiration, you will express the 'idea' dynamically and without preaching. ~ Robert McKee

The power of fictitious writing, for good as well as for evil, is a thing which ought most seriously to be reflected upon. ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe

No matter where; of comfort no man speak:
Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;
Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth ~ William Shakespeare

Movie. What's my favorite kind of movie?"
"Is there a point to this?"
"Please, Lucy. What's my favorite movie?"
"Horror. Why?"
"No reason," I sighed as I slouched back in the chair.
"And would you stop that! Please? It's distracting," she said as she
slammed her hand down on top of mine to stop me from twirling my ring.
I jerked my hand out from under hers so I could cross my arms over my
chest.
"What's with you today?" Her tone was saturated with distaste.
"Nothing."
"Well, you're being awfully annoying for nothing to be wrong," she
retorted. "Go ahead, Josh. I'm listening now."
I could feel the cold emanating from her and flowing in my direction. It
had been this way for a while I just didn't want to see it.
Danny and Josh looked at me and then awkwardly focused on other
things. ~ Kaitlin Scott

I never thought I would write an autobiography, probably because my first novel, Go Now, is really all drawn from my life, even though it's more about the psychology going on. ~ Richard Hell

A lot of times, I'll have a goal, I'll start writing, and I'll end up in some far off place, which is good. It's nice to have a focus, but letting the lyrics write themselves where they need to go is important. ~ James Hetfield

You just write and you don't try to make sense of it. You just put it down the way you got it. ~ Tom Waits

If you are willing to expose your heart ... being publicly private, you just may do something ... ~ Bruce Dern

The final lesson a writer learns is that everything can nourish the writer. The dictionary, a new word, a voyage, an encounter, a talk on the street, a book, a phrase learned. ~ Anais Nin

To be honest, I'm more concerned with living my life than writing about my life. I feel like that's really the main thing I know now that I didn't know when I was younger - and that is that you have to have a life to write about one. If you're more worried about having experiences so you can write about them, I think you're kinda being ridiculous, and I think a lot of young people look at it like that. ~ Jeff Tweedy

Art and writing come from somewhere down around the lizard brain. It's a much more peculiar activity than we like to think it is. The problems arise when we try to domesticate the practice, to pretend that it's a normal human activity and that "everybody's creative." They're not. ~ Dave Hickey

Each book is a separate entity for me. When I'm writing it, I enter its world and inhabit its vocabulary. I forget, as it were, that I ever wrote anything else. ~ Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

I'm a musician. I write songs. I just hope when the day is done I've been able to tear a little corner off of the darkness. ~ Bono

Being a writer is determined more by writing than by having written. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Q: What's the biggest myth about writing?
A: That there's any wildness attached to it. Writing tends to be very deliberate."

[Colm Tóibín, novelist – portrait of the artist (The Guardian, 19 February 2013) ~ Colm Toibin

I learn more from the audience than I can from anybody else. Not from what they write on the scorecards, but how they respond to the movie while they're watching it - where they laugh and where they react. ~ Brett Ratner

Live it up so you can write it down. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience. ~ Emily Dickinson

Three or four threads may be agitated, like telegraph wires, at the same time, and if I were to tap them all I would reveal such a mixture of innocence and duplicity, generosity and calculation, fear and courage, I cannot tell the whole truth simply because I would have to write four journals at once. ~ Anais Nin

The writer doesn't need economic freedom. All he needs is a pencil and some paper. I've never known anything good in writing to come from having accepted any free gift of money. The good writer never applies to a foundation. He's too busy writing something. If he isn't first rate he fools himself by saying he hasn't got time or economic freedom. Good art can come out of thieves, bootleggers, or horse swipes. People really are afraid to find out just how much hardship and poverty they can stand. They are afraid to find out how tough they are. ~ William Faulkner

Can you imagine a world without books to read? ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it. ~ Margaret Atwood

You've a perfect right to call me as impractical as a dormouse, and to feel I'm out of touch with life. But this is the point where we simply can't see eye to eye. We've nothing whatever in common. Don't you see. . . it's not an accident that's drawn me from Blake to Whitehead, it's a certain line of thought which is fundamental to my whole approach. You see, there's something about them both. . . They trusted the universe. You say I don't know what the modern world's like, but that's obviously untrue. Anyone who's spent a week in London knows just what it's like. . . if you mean neurosis and boredom and the rest of it. And I do read a modern novel occasionally, in spite of what you say. I've read Joyce and Sartre and Beckett and the rest, and every atom in me rejects what they say. They strike me as liars and fools. I don't think they're dishonest so much as hopelessly tired and defeated."

Lewis had lit his pipe. He did it as if Reade were speaking to someone else. Now he said, smiling faintly, "I don't think we're discussing modern literature."

Reade had an impulse to call the debater's trick, but he repressed it. Instead he said quietly, "We're discussing modern life, and you brought up the subject. And I'm trying to explain why I don't think that murders and wars prove your point. I'm writing about Whitehead because his fundamental intuition of the universe is the same as my own. I believe like Whitehead that the universe is a single organism that so ~ Colin Wilson

When asked for advice on how to write a short story, Carlos Cortés responded, No advice. Every writer has to exorcise his own demons. ~ Carlos Cortés

I wrote about the things I discovered along the way and about how whether we believe it or not, everything we need to succeed in life is already present inside us. We just have to find the few. ~ Andrew Kendall

There is a big difference between wanting to say you wrote a book, and actually writing one. Many people think they want to write, even though they find crafting sentences and paragraphs unpleasant. They hope there is a way to write without writing. I can tell you with certainty there isn't one. ~ Scott Berkun

Recollect that to a woman who gets her living by her pen, 'time is money,' as it is to an artist. Therefore, encroaching on her time is lessening her income. And yet how often is this done (either heedlessly or selfishly) by persons professing to be her friends, and who are habitually in the practice of interrupting her in her writing hours ... ~ Eliza Leslie

If a writer knows everything that is going to happen, then his book is dead before he begins it. ~ V.S. Naipaul

What it boils down to is that parenting a child with autism is a difficult job; writing about it is far easier. ~ Elizabeth Moon

I like sitting and writing with my buddies. ~ Adam Sandler

Letter writing allows us to be alone yet connected. We need a certain amount of solitude in order to have true ideas to communicate. But few of us desire solitude all the time ... Yet solitude is what makes us contemplative and receptive, more aware of life's gifts and our own special blessings. ~ Alexandra Stoddard

If a plot is a novel's skeleton, and characters are the muscle, then theme is its soul. ~ Janice Hardy

I think, basically, I am an actor. Sometimes I'm an actor who's writing and sometimes an actor who's directing, but I think if I'm forced to fill out a form for my tax return, 'actor' is the first thing I write down. ~ Chris Eigeman

Advertising, Marketing, PR can get more people to buy your book. Only great writing can get more people to love it. ~ Ashok K. Banker

I'm an efficient, good, professional reporter. But I also write. And so what I try to do is write about places that I know that I care about intensely and write about them in a way that conveys the fact that I care. ~ Alma Guillermoprieto

What if a villain exists in all of us? ~ Aly Zigada

I know the exact date that I began writing Twilight, because it was also the first day of swim lessons for my kids. So I can say with certainty that it all started on June 2, 2003. ~ Stephenie Meyer

...it was a funny idea, writing in a language not your own. It almost makes you feel guilty, she said, the way people feel forced to use English, how much of themselves must get left behind in that transition, like people being told to leave their homes and take only a few essential items with them. Yet there was also a purity to that image that attracted her, filled as it was with possibilities for self-reinvention. To be freed from clutter, both mental and verbal, was in some ways an appealing prospect; until you remembered something you needed that you had had to leave behind. She, for instance, found herself unable to make jokes when she spoke in another language...So it was not, she imagined, a question of translation so much as one of adaptation. The personality was forced to adapt to its new linguistic circumstances, to create itself anew... ~ Rachel Cusk

There are many things I think about that never get to the point of becoming serious. In other words, I try to talk myself out of writing, sometimes for many years, and when I run out of arguments, I write. ~ Aleksandar Hemon