Dick Cavett Quotes

Being a playwright is like the equivalent of doing a jigsaw puzzle that has 1,500 pieces, and it's a jigsaw of a blue sky. Not a cloud in sight.

All the writing elements are the same. You need to tell a good story... You've got good characters... People think there's some dramatic difference between writing 'Little Bear' and the 'Hunger Games,' and as a writer, for me, there isn't.

I don't have a style. I just try to write what the story demands.

It's funny, because I don't think of myself as a novelist. I think of myself as a writer.

Especially when I write, I want to get out of people's heads and have them speak and have them get dressed and have them go to work.

I write and write and write, and then I edit it down to the parts that I think are amusing, or that help the storyline, or I'll write a notebook full of ideas of anecdotes or story points, and then I'll try and arrange them in a way that they would tell a semi-cohesive story.

I write in a pretty straightforward way. I kind of sit down at page one and start writing.

I tend to write one character at a time. But I don't write the entirety of one character at a time.

I am a very linear thinker, so I write beginning to end. I write hundreds of pages per book that never make it into print.

When I'm writing, I'm writing for a particular actor. When a lot of writers are writing, they're writing an idea. So they're not really writing in a specific voice.

I wouldn't like to be a character in one of my books!

When you write for a show that's not yours, your job is to hear the voices of the characters and write as best you can for those voices.

Also, they don't understand - writing is language. The use of language. The language to create image, the language to create drama. It requires a skill of learning how to use language.

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

I made a deliberate choice to write something people would enjoy, not knock people out with 'Boy, he can really put a clause together!'

I would recommend the short story form, which is a lot harder to write since you have to be so careful with words, until there is plenty of time to doodle through a novel.

I think I've written 40 books, and none of them have been heavy on action. I'm an introspective person.

I'm very involved in the writing on every level.

I don't like to talk about work in progress, but the novel I'm working on now is definitely not horror.

A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.

The writer of stories or of novels settles on men and imitates them; he exhausts the possibilities of his characters.

I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.

I write short stories. I write every day.

I'm here to get the story on to the page. It would be good to catch your attention, and I have to make you want to read on, and I suppose I prefer you don't actually think about the 'how' at all - the writing technique, the 'style', or even who it is that's putting this together.

Whichever character I'm using and wherever I am in my mind dictates what kind of story I'm going to tell.