Shocking writing is like murder: the questions the jury must decide are the questions of motive and intent.
E.B. White
Ruthless concern with story is what I learned in television. I was always the best at coming up with ideas and laying out the story in an interesting, surprising way, and I did that hundreds of times in the course of a career. I had so much background, understanding story in a deep way. And dialogue, I’m good at it, and it’s because it’s the only thing you have to work with in TV writing.
If a man writes clearly enough any one can see if he fakes. If he mystifies to avoid a straight statement, which is very different from breaking so-called rules of syntax or grammar to make an effect which can be obtained in no other way, the writer takes a longer time to be known as a fake and other writers who are afflicted by the same necessity will praise him in their own defense. True mysticism should not be confused with incompetence in writing which seeks to mystify where there is no mystery but is really only the necessity to fake to cover lack of knowledge or the inability to state clearly. Mysticism implies a mystery and there are many mysteries; but incompetence is not one of them; nor is overwritten journalism made literature by the injection of a false epic quality. Remember this too: all bad writers are in love with the epic.
Ernest Hemingway on writing
We're masochists. We doll ourselves up every night for a city that's just going to end up giving us a black eye anyway. It's our glamorous version of a bad boyfriend.
Kurt Vonnegut on his university-spurned anthropology thesis about storytelling
I think if you want to make it, you really have to work, and she wants to make it without working. And, she counts on her good looks, and her good fashion, and she thinks she’s going to do it, escape all her trouble and finally do it. And, that doesn’t work. So, she’s pretending a lot.
Katherine Pancol on her character Iris and writing
I want so much to be someone who sees something and writes it down in their beautiful leather notebook. The fact is that I write under duress, often in my bed, often at the last minute. I’m kind of a binge writer I would say, which I don’t support.
Lena Dunham
Let me live, love and say it well in good sentences.
Sylvia Plath, via 49 Sylvia Plath Quotes