William Goldman Quotes

I feel satisfaction at the end of the day when I've written a scene that I really like or when I write a good line of dialogue that I read out to my wife or something like that. But there's also days where it's just bloody agony and I go, 'ugh, this is such crap! Why did I think I had any talent?

The story is always better than your ability to write it. My belief about this is that if you ever get to the point that you think you've done a story justice, you're in the wrong business.

It does feel great to be writing, but the process is sometimes excruciating.

I suffer as always from the fear of putting down the first line. It is amazing the terrors, the magics, the prayers, the straitening shyness that assail one. It is as though the words were not only indelible but that they spread out like dye in water and color everything around them. A strange and mystic business, writing.

I have a problem with beginnings... and endings... and middles. But I don't know what else I would do. I find it very, very difficult to write. It takes everything; it's physically and mentally and emotionally exhausting for me. And my neighbours. And my dog.

Someday I would like to be the kind of writer who barrels through a draft, but I can't even seem to barrel through an interview like this, so I imagine I have a long way to go.

I kept trying to write these books that were sort of outside of my realm, and I kept failing.

Until a book starts forming in your head, you always wonder, 'Am I going to be able to do this again?'

There wasn't a persona or an attitude that I could reliably write good stuff from.There wasn't a persona or an attitude that I could reliably write good stuff from.

On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.

I think writer's block is simply the dread that you are going to write something horrible. But as a writer, I believe that if you sit down at the keys long enough, sooner or later something will come out.

Writing is something that you don't know how to do. You sit down and it's something that happens, or it may not happen. So, how can you teach anybody how to write? It's beyond me, because you yourself don't even know if you're going to be able to. I'm always worried, well, you know, every time I go upstairs with my wine bottle. Sometimes I'll sit at that typewriter for fifteen minutes, you know. I don't go up there to write. The typewriter's up there. If it doesn't start moving, I say, well this could be the night that I hit the dust.

Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.

I am slow. A sentence often takes an hour to compose before I throw it out. What can you do?

I wish I could be a better writer, but writing is so difficult. I get seduced by visual aesthetics. Because I just like making beautiful pictures, sometimes I wander away from making a clear statement.

I think most writers can't really think about their work without a kind of revulsion. And I think that's probably why we keep going back and trying again, trying to do better each time.

There is the first satisfaction of arranging it on a bit of paper; after many, many false tries, false moves, finally you have the sentence you recognize as the one you are looking for.

Writing is simple. First you have to make sure you have plenty of paper... sharp pencils... typewriter ribbon. Then put your belly up to the desk... roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter... and stare at it until beads of blood appear on your forehead.

Writing is a long and lonesome business; back of the problems in thought and composition hover always the awful questions: Is this the page that shows the empty shell? Is it here and now that they find me out?

I don't know about writing. It's quite lonely. You have to have a lot of patience with yourself.

At this moment, the story in his head was perfect. He also knew from experience that it would degenerate the second he started typing, because such was the nature of writing.

Whenever you're making a movie, especially when you're writing, you always have self-doubts.

When you're writing a movie or a play and writing isn't going well, which is for me the normal condition - it's an exceptional day when suddenly I've got something and it's going well - you can call the studio or the producer or whoever is waiting for it and say, "I know I said I was going to have it in by the end of the summer.

People ask me whether I think that one day I might wake up one morning and run dry, but I've had the opposite feeling - that I would die before I had time to write all the ideas in my drawer.

Writing about writing is a bit like talking about a conversation you are having; it tends to obscure desperation about where the next word is coming from.