Gentlemen, I would rather have written those lines than take Quebec tomorrow.
Every one of his opinions appears to himself to be written with sunbeams.
If you just read Joseph Campbell, who has written amazing books on mythology and religion, they all do come together at some point. There are some of the greatest stories that there have ever been in the Bible. All you have to do is read the book of Maccabi, it's like a film script.
I haven't written enough songs to be able to say that I have a system. I've only written a handful.
A great amount has been talked and written about what constitutes a sufficient balance and what really is meant by the concepts of "balance" and "deterrence".
Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before.
Sometimes what I'm looking for is the thing that will help renew people's interest in a writer that they may have written off as not their kind of writer.
It's extremely seldom that anybody wants me to change what I've written about them. Generally I portray them in a good light, if they're friends
I use non-fiction work written by Whites in my research. It's indispensable. That wasn't the problem. I said that "The Wire" was a cliché! It's like my writing a series about Jewish life and casting all of the characters as inside traders.
It doesn't have to be the truth, just your vision of it, written down.
I always think it is kind of funny when it comes to wisdom, and I say God has a sense of humor, because my middle name is Solomon, and I love the Book of Proverbs which is written by Solomon, and I have read from the Book of Proverbs to start and end every day since I was 14.
When I was young I longed to write a great novel that should win me fame. Now that I am getting old my first book is written to amuse children.
I just wish, when neither of us has written to my husband's mother, I didn't feel so much worse about it than he does.
I ask myself: is every story that has ever been written in this world, a story of suffering and affliction?
I think for [Albert] Camus his mother was more than just that. She's love, absolute love. That's why it's written for her, dedicated to 'you who will never be able to read this book'.
The purpose of the first draft is not to get it right, but to get it written.
But the vast majority of books ever written are not accessible to anyone except the most tenacious researchers at premier academic libraries. Books written after 1923 quickly disappear into a literary black hole.
Anyone should be very suspicious of a sentence he's written that can't be read aloud easily.
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.
Victor Young had been hired to write the score for the dances of The Ten Commandments but he became very ill. You were then hired to write the score. But at the same time you'd written The Man with the Golden Arm score.