John Cleese Quotes

One thing I can say right off the bat is that creating great editorial is a huge challenge, and you can't help but go through the process and not appreciate how valuable this skill is, and how much I admire the people who do this every day.

Skill in writing frees you to write what you want to write. It may also show you what you want to write. Craft enables art.

Writing a novel that works is an extremely difficult thing to do. It requires a level of skill and dedication that always surprises me.

If you ever read one of my books I hope you'll think it looks so easy. In fact, I wrote those chapters 20 times over, and over, and over, and that if you want to write at a good level, you'll have to do that too.

I think comedy is the hardest actual form of writing there is.

I've never written for anybody else. For me, it was a challenge. I write for me. I don't write for anybody else. And what was good about it was that I was writing for somebody I knew. I knew what my mother thinks and how she feels. So it was finding that creative spirit to write about my mother.

Writing is very difficult. You have 120 pages of blank paper and it's like, "Go fill that up with some funny stuff," and that's challenging.

I love writing stand-up so much and tinkering and looking for ideas.

I think if you write humor, then people don't - you know - they don't give you that much credit. They tend to think you just dictate your stories into a tape recorder. And I'm not necessarily insulted by that, because I think that just means that it looks easy.

If you think it's easy to write jokes about fried calamari, you've probably never tried.

I write pretty fast, probably faster than most people. But I might think about something for six hours, then write it in 20 minutes. So did I write for six hours and 20 minutes, or just 20 minutes? I used to write absolutely every day, except for days when I had to travel or something.

Writing a book is hard. It turns out, writing a second book is twice as hard.

I definitely think of myself still as a writer first, and feel like - with the lucky exception of this - any acting opportunity I've gotten is usually because I was writing on it. This is like a wonderful vacation. If you've ever sat in a writers' room it's the most disgusting, tortuous place, so it's a treat to be treated like a movie actor.

I begin each book with a challenge to myself.

My husband says I have too much imagination, but I don't think a writer can have too much imagination!

I love to write, so I think writing would be the next natural step. And if I'm making something that I'm writing, it would also probably make sense to be a producer and have some creative input from that perspective as well. Eventually, I do want to direct, but I want to get comfortable in those two jobs first. I want to dip my foot into this pool before I dive in I guess.

In a sense, the story, or poem or verse or whatever it is you're writing, you can kind of think of it as a kind of projectile. Imagine it is a kind of projectile which has been specially shaped to be aerodynamic, and that your target is the soft grey putty of the reader's brain.

You see, writing down your meanderings gets something started deep in the recesses of your brain. That distant part of your mind knows that you want to write stories or poems or plays and not endless jabber, and it will get to work. It may take a while. You may have to write this stuff for hours or days or weeks, but eventually that subterranean part of your brain will come through and begin to send you ideas.

The fallacy is that you have to hold some sort of stake in the grief or horror in order to write about it - I think the opposite is true.

The story is always better than your ability to write it.

I'm always presenting myself with problems to solve as a writer.

Everyone assumes writers spend their time lounging around, writing and occasionally striking a pose whilst having a think.

When I write a novel, I have what I think of as an icon that helps get me into the world of the book.

There's no real formula for doing it, it's either just living life and writing down a joke you think of in the middle of the day and then pieces those together later.

In a regular class I don't focus on the form, but I think that focus is helpful for brainstorming and coming up with ideas quickly, especially with autobiographical material.