Tracy Letts Quotes

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

I write what I write.

People love talking about writers as storytellers, but I hate being called that: it suggests I got it from my grandmother or something, when my writing really comes out of silence. If a storyteller came up to me, I'd run away.

When I started off with Trainspotting, it was the way the characters came to me. That's how they sounded to me. It seemed pretentious to sound any other way. I wasn't making any kind of political statement.

When I write, I try not to cast in my head, because then I'm writing to a major movie star, and it picks up those ticks, and that's not what I want to do.

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

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.

Write in a disciplined manner, but write in a way that is natural to the individual's thought processes.

The elegance and the quality - the talent is always in the literature. I start with the word and I base everything on that. It doesn't make any difference to me.

Ignore all advice about writing. Leave your blood on every page. Every page!

I don't know what makes a writer's voice. It's dozens of things. There are people who write who don't have it. They're tone-deaf, even though they're very fluent. It's an ability, like anything else, being a doctor or a veterinarian, or a musician.

The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind.

How hard it is to make your thoughts look anything but imbecile fools when you paint them with ink on paper.

The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.

Different authors write different ways, have different relationships with their audiences, and those are all legitimate.

I have heard of novels started in the middle, at the end, written in patches to be joined together later, but I have never felt the slightest desire to do this.

I don't fiddle or edit or change while I'm going through that first draft.

My primary ambition is to be a fiction writer... Being a critic wasn't an aspiration of mine.

I don't know if there is any one secret to successful writing, but one important step is to move beyond imitation and discover what you can write that no one else can - that is, find out who you are and write that in an appropriate narrative and style.

I still write the same way and have the same perspective.

Every book I write, the first thing I have to do is get into the voice, and the voice varies from book to book - that's part of what's interesting to me.

I figure anytime you put an adjective before 'writer,' it's a way of dismissing the writer.

My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote.

I'm not a writer, and I don't want there to be any mistake about that.

I've been writing for people long enough to know that it has got to feel comfortable coming out of their mouths, especially when you're doing something that is first person and is so near and dear to you.