We exaggerate the difference between documentary and fiction. I think that on some level a fiction film is also a documentary on the actors. You can't wash away your life's history, which is written on your face, unless you get a facelift.
Sometimes everything has to be inscribed across the heavens so you can find the one line already written inside you.
Once I've written a song, I sometimes refine them.
My feeling is that, and I've been writing about my family over the years, although it might make them feel uncomfortable, people generally like to be written about. If I've written a song about the family, they enjoy being mentioned in the songs. Nobody's confronted me and said 'don't write any songs about me.
There is no feeling to be compared with the feeling of having written and finished a story.
The only thing that would ever embarrass me would be something I would write that would be badly written.
I've never written a play before, and I'll never write one again. You can quote me.
Most science fiction seemed to be written for people who already liked science fiction; I wanted to write stories for anyone, anywhere, living at any time in the history of the world.
Cutting for Stone is nothing short of masterful -a riveting tale of love, medicine, and the complex dynamic of twin brothers. It is beautifully conceived and written. The settings are wonderfully pictorial. There is no doubt in my mind that Cutting for Stone will endure in the permanent literature of our time.
Ten thousand things there are which we believe merely upon the authority or credit of those who have spoken or written them.
I'm much more concerned about what artists think. But as you get older you tend to get much more isolated; you're not out in the bar, having long drunken arguments on the benefits of your work vs. someone else's. It's hard to know how people are looking at it, and you don't get much feedback. The written critical stuff seems to be the feedback, but that's hard to interpret.
I was always so relieved that anyone wants to publish anything I've written.
If you have written really well, people will swear that it happened to you.
Bullfighting has some of the elements of a sport or contest, and in the United States most people think of it as a sport, an unfair sport. If you're in Spain or Mexico it's absolutely not a sport; it's not thought of as a sport and it's not written about as a sport. It has elements of public spectacle, but then so does, for example, the Super Bowl. It has elements of a deeply entrenched, deeply conservative tradition, a tradition that resists change, as you pointed out.
It is to be regretted that few persons who have arrived at any degree of eminence or fame, have written Memorials of themselves, at least such as have embraced their private as well as their public life.
Your words have come true with a vengeance that I shd [should] be forestalled. . . I never saw a more striking coincidence. If Wallace had my M. S. sketch written out in 1842 he could not have made a better short abstract! Even his terms now stand as Heads of my Chapters.
If anybody asks me what I have accomplished, I will say all I have accomplished is that I have written a few good sentences.
I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional.
I have written a lot about snakes. There's something pretty primordial about it.
"The word which God has written on the brow of every person," wrote Victor Hugo, "is Hope. " As long as we have hope no situation is hopeless.