Gail Simone Quotes

I tell my students you have an absolute right to write about people you know and love. You do. But the kicker is you have a responsibility to make the characters large enough that you will not have sinned against them.

It is a fairly serious thing that you're doing if you're writing about people who are still alive and who still have a role in public life. Sometimes you don't want to be reminded too much of the responsibility.

I don't really believe in torpedoing someone's career when they've been absolved of doing something.

Whatever the job you are asked to do at whatever level, do a good job because your reputation is your resume.

I personally have a great deal of respect for readers. I have a great deal of respect for the human race. I think most people can tell the difference between fiction and fact. I think that the action of writing about something does not condone it. The best thing I can ever hope to do is provide good questions, and I think I do that. I hope I do.

It's probably fair to say I have taken myself too seriously on some jobs. I'm sure I'm more guilty of being difficult than I'd like to remember. I don't regret my desires; I've regretted the way I would communicate my desires. Maybe I've lost a job because of some rumor, I doubt it. But nobody good that I've worked with has ever said anything negative about me, because we've never had a negative experience. By good, I mean directors who do their homework, people that are passionate, crazy, never sleep, and do like I do and just go after it.

I believe strongly in an author's moral responsibility. But his first obligation is to write good books.

I like my job and I want to do well at it but I think there's much more integrity to being a journalist maybe than being an actor.

Editors may think of themselves as dignified headwaiters in a well-run restaurant but more often [they] operate a snack bar . . . and expect you to be grateful that at least they got the food to the table warm.

Directing is such alchemy, it's so easy to fail. And I've seen people who are great at their jobs because everybody has a go. Editors, DPs, actors, craft services guy, everybody wants to try it out but it is such a diffuse but necessary set of skills that you never know which one this person might lack.

If you have an opinion and people disagree with you, you might not get a job. You might be blacklisted. You might have fewer followers on Instagram.

The late John Jacob Astor, a personage little given to poetic enthusiasm, had no hesitation in pronouncing my first grand point to be prudence; my next, method. I do not speak it in vanity, but simply record the fact, that I was not unemployed in my profession by the late John Jacob Astor; a name which, I admit, I love to repeat, for it hath a rounded and orbicular sound to it, and rings like unto bullion. I will freely add, that I was not insensible to the late John Jacob Astor's good opinion.

New Rule: News organizations have to stop using the phrase: "We go beyond the headlines." That's your job, dummy. You don't see American Airlines saying, "We land our jets on the runway"!

When you leave a good job to go off on your own and don't expect to make money for a while, you name the firm whatever your wife says you should.

Sir Oswald Mosley thought his job is not just keep Britain from going to war with his beloved Germany, he saw it as his job to organize a complementary fascist movement inside the U.K. So, he formed this organization as the British Union of Fascists in '32. In 1936, they changed their name to the British Union of Fascists and National Socialists

There's never any humongous next draft. I know a writer who every time he finished a novel - you would know his name very well - but his editor would come and live with him for a month. And they would go through the manuscript together.

I am not a new journalist, whatever that is. I just sit here at the typewriter and bang away at the old forms.

You can't expect to work for the Daily Mail group and have the rest of society treat with you respect as a useful member of society, because you are not.

I just try to be honest, because I think that's part of my job description as a writer.

Who are these bloggers? They're not trained editors at Vogue magazine. There are bloggers writing recipes that aren't tested that aren't necessarily very good, or are copies of what really good editors have created and done. Bloggers create a kind of a popularity but they are not the experts. We have to understand that.

I was spurred by the fact that having worked for women's magazines myself as a journalist, if you go off and interview a female celebrity, I'd just go in and interview them like I'd interview any human being and talk about the things that interested me. And you'd come back, and you'd file your copy. And then my editor would read through my copy and go, why haven't you asked them if they want kids? And I'd be like, well, I don't know, I interviewed Aerosmith last week. And I didn't ask them that.

According to, for example, one academic by the name of Philip Harvey, whose expertise is basically how do we create a New Deal, today. According to his estimate, these jobs could be created for far less than the [Barack] Obama stimulus package, which cost, you know, $700 or $800 billion, something like that, and produced around 3 million jobs - not a lot. According to his estimates, it would cost less to produce two-thirds of 20 million.

My own view is simply that there are some very basic rules; very simple rules that apply to all writing in a way, which is: don't lie; if you're wrong, correct; do not misrepresent; and try and keep oneself intellectually honest - which means, as a writer, the very difficult task in public of admitting you were wrong.

A writer should be of as great probity and honesty as a priest of God. He is either honest or not, as a woman is either chaste or not, and after one piece of dishonest writing he is never the same again.

Being a professional means doing your job on the days you don't want to do it