Joss Whedon Quotes

I just believe that young people need to be able to learn how to write in their own voice. Just like a musician, you pride yourself on having your own distinct sound.

I prefer writing originals.

Whatever China I'd been born into, I would probably still have become a painter - I loved sketching portraits as a child, and began art classes at the age 7. But if China hadn't been under Maoist rule, I might never have become a writer.

As a writer, you have to first of all write what you want to. Listen to advice, by all means, but don't get bogged down in it.

No one has the Houdini school of composition.

As a writer, I always tend to take the liberty and the great artistic luxury of a composite form of writing.

If you don't have a unique voice, then you're not really a writer.

I have abused language. I love it, and I abuse it... I don't write just to be clever. But sometimes I do. And if you don't have an understanding of the language, then the way in which it's bent doesn't actually register.

I definitely still like writing one-liners, but I also think that I've changed a lot in that I've allowed myself freedom to grow.

What moves me most is style: the quality of the writing rather than the story being told.

You have to write your own story, your own graph and rhythm.

I don't consciously think of any certain direction when I'm writing. I only try not to be repetitive or redundant.

In the most self-protective of ways, I don't think about the reader when I'm writing - I just think about the story.

It's very easy I think when you're a creative person to wait for the right thing and to start getting self-conscious about how you are going to express what you do and what's special about you. I would say in general, a lot of times the answer is that you just dive into something and you find your own voice through that process.

Decide for yourself what kind of works you want to create... facts, essays, poems - do you want to speak or to sing?

I would like to use stories as a springboard for children to make their own creative responses. I would like to encourage them to express themselves using music, art, film or whatever, and upload it to a website having been inspired by particular stories.

Writing is not a competitive sport. Everyone that writes has his or her own voice.

I do love editorials - you're free to do whatever you want and portray a different character.

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

I think of a piece, and then people who are competent fabricate it. But lately I've started finger painting, which probably should be a joke but isn't!

I tell the stories that are of interest to me.

I'm a person who is always trying to write in a different vein.

The way to write is well, and how is your own business.

I always wrote little things when I was younger. My first opus was a book of poems put down in a spiral notebook at five or six, handsomely accompanied by crayon illustrations.

For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.