Colin Firth Quotes

A man who has not enough originality to think out a new title for his book will be much less capable of giving it new contents.

Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a direction you don't expect.

Another strand of my writing is the importance of the idea. If you think about fiction writing as a spectrum, where at one end of the spectrum in the infrared, are the story tellers, and the people for whom creation of wonderful characters and telling a good story is the most important thing.

I do think that at a certain point, the reboot sequel mode has to give way to original ideas and back to a place where, you know, films are, you know, a medium and the cinema is a place you go to see something that is, you know, wholly new.

Since I was a kid, I could make up stories, I could make up funny jokes and I could always do it. When I'm walking down the street or having dinner, ideas will hit me, and I write them down on matchbooks or napkins and throw them in the draw.

I think of myself as a songwriter, a weaver of story and imagination in a way that a novelist might write a book.

I like the discipline of writing a script. You can't go into the character's head - you have to find these creative ways to help externalize what they're thinking.

I've quit writing screenplay [adaptations]. It's too much work. I don't look at writing a novel as work, because I only have to please myself. I have a good time sitting here by myself, thinking up situations and characters, getting them to talk - it's so satisfying. But screenwriting's different. You might think you're writing for yourself, but there are too many other people to please.

The kind of poetry I write, lyric poetry, I think is really concerned with intimacy, with mystery. That needn't be religious mystery, there are mysteries to do with everyday life.

Pico Iyer describes his writing as "intimate letters to a stranger," and I think that is what the writing process is. It begins with a question, and then you follow this path of exploration.

There is no pleasure in the world like writing well and going fast.

I think a diversity of expression can only be good, so I think the more that people write about their experience, use their imagination to deal with their experience, you know, I think that's going to be good for not only for those authors but also for people who are interested in trying to understand it.

I've been writing as long as I've been able to form words. I never wrote with an idea of publishing anything until I began working on '[To Kill a] Mockingbird'. I think that what went before may have been a rather subconscious form of learning how to write, of training myself.

Writing well is at one and the same time good thinking, good feeling, and good expression; it is having wit, soul, and taste, all together.

I try to write every day. Sometimes the things come out well, and sometimes they don't. When they come out well you think, Wow, I must be really great; and when they come out poorly, you think you must be terrible, but the truth is that's how any process works.

One of the things I'm real proud of is I just made a deal with 20th Century Fox, and I've got my own production company now. I'm developing some television and movies for other people because I have a lot of fresh new ideas. To write is what I love the most.

In terms of writing, I think what most fiction writers treasure more than anything is the feeling that they're living for the length of a book inside another person.

I've always known that I've wanted to write, but I always saw myself doing that in the context of something other than film, so it was a really beautiful and kind of perfect moment in my life when I realized that I could combine this idea of wanting to write and tell my own stories with the environment I had grown up in and knew well - that I could make film as opposed to writing being a departure from what I knew.

There are two kinds of writer: those that make you think, and those that make you wonder.

Nothing frustrates me more than someone who reads something of mine or anyone else's and says, angrily, 'I don't buy it.' Why are they angry? Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head—even if in the end you conclude that someone else's head is not a place you'd really like to be.

I think my home is in that sort of the part of cinema that's disappeared is where I lived, that sort of mid-budget you know, drama. I suppose that's what I am known for.

I don't think the function of writing, at least for me as a fiction writer, is to say to people, "Here's the answer." It's not an op-ed.

Really good original ideas are very hard to come up with. Good ideas - easy. Really good, original ideas - it can take months.

Good writing isn’t a science. It’s an art, and the horizon is infinite. You can always get better.

I'm a more skilled writer now, but after 23 books it's harder to be fresh and that's really important to me. I don't want to write the same thing over and over again.