The Writer: Vern didn't just mean being off limits inside the junkyard, or fudging on our folks, or going on a hike up the railroad to Harlow. He meant those things, but it seems to me now it was more and that we all knew it. Everything was there and...
[first lines] The Writer: [voiceover] I was 12 going on 13 the first time I saw a dead human being. It happened in the summer of 1959-a long time ago, but only if you measure in terms of years. I was living in a small town in Oregon called Castle Roc...
Writing a book is a long and difficult process for me. I'm a slow writer, so I spend the year with Elvis Cole and Joe Pike in my head. I was thinking about this the other day. I wrote the first book in 1987. Literally every day since that time, Elvis...
[last title cards] Title card: _In Cold Blood_ made Truman Capote the most famous writer in America. He never finished another book. Title card: The epigraph he chose for his last, unfinished work reads: "More tears are shed over answered prayers tha...
Assistant Coach: Hey ladies, are you gonna be ready to play football this fall? huh? Benny O'Donnell: I don't know coach, I've been doin' so well in english I thought I might work on bein' a writer. What do ya think about that? Assistant Coach: Boy, ...
[following Erin's impassioned speech about the Nazi Holocaust] Tito: [raises hand] What's a holocaust? Erin Gruwell: Who here knows what the Holocaust is? [all keep their hands down except Ben, the only white kid, who sheepishly raises his] Erin Gruw...
Ben: Ms. G, we can fight this y'know, like the Freedom Riders. Marcus: Yeh yeh, we all drive around on a bus, only this time they try and bust us up we bust a few of them board member's heads. Brandy: Or we can go to the newspapers. Media...? Tito: O...
Alejandro: I was having trouble deciding what candy I wanted. Then I heard gunshots. I looked down to see that one of my friends had blood coming from his back and his mouth. The next day I pulled down my shirt and got strapped with a gun I found in ...
[first lines] Writer: So, you were raised in a zoo? Adult Pi Patel: Born and raised. In Pondicherry, in what was the French part of India. My father owned the zoo, and I was delivered on short notice by a herpetologist, who was there to check on the ...
The Unmarried Mother: I stopped looking in the mirror. I hated what I saw. I have no photos of myself as a young girl. I don't even remember what I looked like. It's just more of a feeling now. The Bartender: Well, you look better than I do. The Unma...
Here's what I mean by the miracle of language. When you're falling into a good book, exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, a passageway between a reader's heart and a writer's, a connection that transcends the barriers of co...
I quit my last real job, as a writer at a magazine, when I was twenty-one. That was the moment when I lost my place of prestige on the fast track, and slowly, millimeter by millimeter, I started to get found, to discover who I had been born to be, in...
I often get asked the question, 'If you had to compare your writing to an author who would it be?' My answer is always the same; the author I compare myself to is me. Every writer has a unique style relevant to only themselves. I am nothing like othe...
Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer br...
I believe the target of anything in life should be to do it so well that it becomes an art. When you read some books they are fantastic, the writer touches something in you that you know you would not have brought out of yourself. He makes you discov...
As a writer, I need an enormous amount of time alone. Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It's a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in...
To enjoy and learn from what you read you must understand the meanings of the words a writer uses. You do yourself a grave disservice if you read around words you don’t know, or worse, merely guess at what they mean without bothering to look them u...
I believe the greatest pleasure in writing is in the progressive artistry of it. Each project is an attempt to do better than before - to produce a worthy work of art - something having meaning not only for the writer but also for those who may share...
You can be a member of all of the romance writers associations, take part in all of the networking available, or win the latest romance award... but guess what? None of that makes a difference if you don't WRITE something people want to READ. The gre...
Five common traits of good writers: (1) They have something to say. (2) They read widely and have done so since childhood. (3) They possess what Isaac Asimov calls a "capacity for clear thought," able to go from point to point in an orderly sequence,...
He, the true writer, is the department store dummy at the very center of the whole establishment, the one left alone on display all night, a price tag stapled to every piece of clothing they’ve yanked onto him, binoculars and frog flippers included...
