writing Quotes

Matthew Wiener on 'Mad Men' writes the entire series before they start shooting, and if you have that, then what you can do with character and story is not at all unlike what you can do in a novel.

In general, writers shouldn't be killed for what they write, though I can think of exceptions.

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

This strange business of what it is to be a writer is this increasingly insane world in which we live, in which surrealism, it seems, is the new realism.

The way you write a screenplay is that you close your eyes and run the movie in your head and then you write it down.

I never thought of myself as a writer about religion until a religion came after me.

Sometimes you find your voice by trying to write like people, and sometimes you find it by trying to write unlike people.

Art was always my main focus; I fell into writing by accident in the 1980s, writing magazine articles to pay for my studio. I have to put myself into the position of writing; sometimes it doesn't work, and sometimes it works great.

It's a cliche, but true, that writing is intensely solitary and at times really lonely. I sit in one room and talk to squirrels and blue jays all day.

In a faraway land called 'pre-2000,' what Earthlings now call blogging was called 'keeping a diary.' It's hard work to do well. I tried doing it in the early 1990s but had to stop because I no longer had a life - instead I had this thing that generated anecdotes to go into my diary. The diary took over and I had to stop.