Mara Wilson Quotes

Content dictates form and style.

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

Writing can be fun. I think the challenge is to convey interesting things in accessible ways, and that's what I aim to do in books.

Because I was a television writer for many years, I write very conversationally. I put things straight, and with a lot of humor.

I write. This is what I do. My job is to sit down with my vocabulary, select words, and decide what order they should be placed in an attempt to keep someone's attention and perhaps provide them with a laugh or two along the way.

I'm a novelist first, and I wrote a bunch of books, and everything I write, I just find people are more interesting when there's an element of humor to it.

Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand.

I love essays, but they're not always the best way to communicate to a larger audience.

I write the kind of stuff I'd like to watch.

Writing and telling are almost the same, the way I do it.

Whatever I'm thinking about has got to fit into thirty-two pages, the standard picture book size. So that's something. But the structure and the form for me are almost the most important, because these will express as much as words and images will the content of the work.

When you think about it, media's the intersection of content and technology - it's all about storytelling, like photography and the camera.

Technology must remain a tool. It's a great tool, but technology is the pen to write the book. It's not the book. If you have a great pen, maybe you'll write faster or it will look better, but at the end, you have something to say, or you don't.

I enjoy both TV writing and novel writing, and they are very similar. The goal is to entertain and amuse the audience, and I subscribe to this P.G. Wodehouse piece of advice: "Try to give pleasure with every sentence."

A lot of people consider my books to be straightforward, but I think that I write from atmosphere to atmosphere rather than from event to event.

Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words.

Manner is all in all, whate'er is writ,The substitute for genius, sense, and wit.

I think I was always writing books that had very clear scenic structures. I do tend to write in scenes. I do tend to have a fair amount of dialogue. And I do tend to use stories that don't sprawl all over the place, that have a very sharp focus in terms of how they unfold in time.

If you write well, you don't have to dress funny.

You can tell within a sentence if something is fiction or non-fiction. You can tell in the artifice of the language or the care of the construction the difference between art and life.

So, then, what is style? There are two chief aspects of any piece of writing: 1) what you say and 2) how you say it. The former is "content" and the latter is "style."

Oftentimes an originator of new language forms is called 'pretentious' by jealous talents. But it ain’t whatcha write, it’s the way atcha write it.

It's not knowing how to write that makes you interesting, it's what you write.

Screenplay is the toughest form of writing for me, because you need to be in present tense. You need to be describing things as they occur.

When I started writing short stories, I thought I was writing a novel. I had like 60 or 70 pages. And what I realized was that I don't write inner monologue. I don't want to talk about what somebody is thinking or feeling. I wanted to try to show it in an interesting way. And so what I realized was that I was really writing a screenplay.