Finished crap can be edited. Unfinished greatness languishes forever. The only bad writing is the thing you didn't write!
I write novels with a lawyer as the hero, no matter how oxymoronic that might sound.
I'm really proud of the writing on Door to Door, and I think that's the Emmy that meant the most - the writing.
In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can't read. If they could read their stuff, they'd stop writing.
I almost always urge people to write in the first person. Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it.
I want to write without shame or pride or over-compensation in one direction or another. To write freely.
I start work at 7 A.M. and write all day, seven days a week. If I don't write, I can't sleep.
Borrowed wives, like borrowed books, are seldom returned.
It is better to be entirely without a book than to believe it entirely.
Schoolmaster, stick to your books; farmer, to your pigs.
If it's not good enough for adults, it's not good enough for children. If a book that is going to be marketed for children does not interest me, a grownup, then I am dishonoring the children for whom the book is intended, and I am dishonoring books. ...
...Samuel rode lightly on top of a book and he balanced happily among ideas the way a man rides white rapids in a canoe. But Tom got into a book, crawled and groveled between the covers, tunneled like a mole among the thoughts, and came up with the b...
Jesus is the perfect name! He who put away his fame! And persecuted in shame! That you will never be the same! It's because of you and I He came! Believe him or have yourself to blame! In the book of life, have your name!
Read sometimes for the story, Bobby. Don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words - the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers that won't do that. But when you find a book that has both good story and good words, t...
I went to work, but the mood of the book would not die; it lingered, coloring everything I saw, heard, did. I now felt that I knew what the white man were feeling. Merely because I had read a book that had spoken of how they lived and thought, I iden...
The lecturer points to Dietrich Bonhoeffer's decision to get engaged while in prison as his "positive statement that life will go on," his affirmation of the power of love.
There are three kind of history. The first is what really happened and that is forever lost. The second is what most people thought happened, and we can recover that with assiduous effort. The third is what the people in power wanted the future to th...
My university degree is in art and, yes, I do a lot of drawing for all my books. I have a big drafting table set up in a spare bedroom and I cover it with maps and house plans and sketches that I use in the books. Also, I truly love architecture, so ...
His novel or book of poems, decent, adequate, arises not from an exercise of style or will, as the poor unfortunate believes, but as the result of an exercise of concealment. There must be many books, many lovely pines, to shield from hungry eyes the...
Confronted with the choice between having time and having things, we’ve chosen to have things. Today it is a luxury to read what Socrates said, not because the books are expensive, but because our time is scarce.
The library was still giving trouble: a few books in some of the more obscure corners of the stacks retained some autonomy, dating back to an infamous early experiment with flying books, and lately they’d begun to breed. Shocked undergraduates had ...
