I'm always conscious when I'm writing a story that the women in my books need to save themselves. They don't need to be scooped up into a man's arms and carried off into the sunset. But I also can't stand when writers feature a really strong female c...
I write simply because I hear voices of people in my head who won't give me peace until I convey their stories to the rest of the world. Seriously. They've always been with me. While other girls played with dolls, and my brothers with Hot Wheels, I w...
With a book called 'Keeping Score,' I really did want to write a book about the Korean War, because I felt that it is the least understood war in the American cultural imagination. So I set out with the idea that Americans didn't know much about the ...
We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans - because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That's why we paint, that's why we dare to love someon...
Max Vandenburg: [presenting Liesel with a blank book of pages] Write. In my religion we're taught that every living thing, every leaf, every bird, is only alive because it contains the secret word for life. That's the only difference between us and a...
I started writing songs when I was real young, when I was 3 years old. The piano spoke to me - I don't remember when I wasn't playing piano. My second grade talent show was the first time I performed my own thing. I dressed up as Dracula and played a...
After I wrote my memoir, 'A Long Way Gone,' I was a bit exhausted. I didn't want to write another memoir; I felt that it might not be sane for one to speak about himself for many, many, many years in a row. At the same time, I felt the story of 'Radi...
People book me because of the songs I write, not because of the sets that I play, per se... I'm sure I'm going to be moving to a laptop really soon, but I was one of the last guys to let the vinyl go. I was crying. In my room, I still have thousands ...
Each of my books has taken me a different length of time to write - eight months for 'Seesaw Girl,' eight months for 'Shard,' three years for 'When My Name Was Keoko!' The publisher takes another year and a half to work on the book, so altogether eac...
I talk to my readers on social networking sites, but I never tell them what the book is about. Writing is lonely, so from time to time I talk to them on the Internet. It's like chatting at a bar without leaving your office. I talk with them about a l...
Each time I write a new piece, whether a novel, a picture book, a speech or anything, really, it has so much to do with what I'm going through personally or a problem I'm trying to work out. When I wrote my novel 'Baby,' my three children had all jus...
I'm not confident, and yet I'm oddly confident. You have to have a certain amount of ego to be a writer in the first place, and to write things that might be controversial. I've wasted a lot of time worrying about it: am I tough enough to do it? Well...
An evil fate has deprived me of the full use of my right hand, so that I am not able to play my compositions as I feel them. The trouble with my hand is that certain fingers have become so weak, probably through writing and playing too much at one ti...
Because I spend so much time traveling, I tend to do most of my reading on the same iPad on which I write. For me, it's words, not paper, that matter most in the end. This practice has had the additional benefit of greatly reducing the time I spend s...
Proust writes, he remembers, physically. He depends on his body to give him the information that will bring him to the past. His book is called 'In Search of Lost Time,' and he does it through the senses. He does it through smell. He does it through ...
[subtitled version] [the students are writing an examination] Pépinot enfant: Leclerc! Leclerc: What? Pépinot enfant: Are we still friends? Leclerc: Sure, why? Pépinot enfant: How much is 5 plus 3? Leclerc: 53. Pépinot enfant: You sure? Leclerc: ...
Captain Ramius: Ryan, sit here. Jack Ryan: I'm not a Naval officer! I'm with the CIA! Captain Ramius: CIA? Jack Ryan: I'm not an agent, I just write books for the CIA! Captain Ramius: Whatever. Sit here and do exactly what I tell you.
[At the gravesite of his father] Ratso Rizzo: He was even dumber than you. He couldn't even write his own name. "X," that's what it ought to say on that goddamn headstone, one big lousy "X". Just like our dump. Condemned by order of City Hall.
[King is writing a letter to his girlfriend] Francis: It ain't D-E-R-E, it's D-E-A-R. And "Sarah" ain't got no two R's, King. Damn, you dumb! King: It don't make no difference. She know what I mean. She don't read too good nohow.
Ryad: [letter to Malik] It was great getting your letter. First, I hear from you. Second, I see you've made a lot of fucking progress. You write like a pro and I'm glad. At least I served a purpose. I can tell you now, it was no piece of cake.
Joe Gillis: Tell her, Max. C'mon, do her that favor. Tell her there isn't going to be any picture. Tell her there are no fan letters other than the ones you write. Norma Desmond: It's not true! Max! Max Von Mayerling: Madame is the greatest star of t...
