Once I had all the facts in, I found I didn't have the immoral courage to pull the caper. So I wrote it as a story. As a teenager, I didn't have any skills for writing as such, so it came out in 1500 words.
Theodore Sturgeon

I got the regular call, that they were doing a Broadway musical of Hairspray, and would I come and audition. I was familiar with the movie, because at the time it came out my lover wrote for Premiere magazine, and we had to see everything.
Harvey Fierstein

Hair is also a problem. I remember once, when I was reporting from Beirut at the height of the civil war, someone wrote in to the BBC complaining about my appearance.
Kate Adie

I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
Jeffrey Archer

The author O. Henry taught me about the value of the unexpected. He once wrote about the noise of flowers and the smell of birds - the birds were chickens and the flowers dried sunflowers rattling against a wall.
Chuck Jones

I write from my imagination, not from what I've read in books or seen on TV or to make money. I wrote from an idea I was passionate about.
Dirk Benedict

I wrote two plotted books, got some of the fundamentals of storytelling down, then... it's sort of like taking the training wheels off, trying to write a book that's fun in the same way without relying on quite such mechanical or external beats.
Jonathan Franzen

That's why I wrote this book: to show how these people can imbue us with hope. I read somewhere that when a person takes part in community action, his health improves. Something happens to him or to her biologically. It's like a tonic.
Studs Terkel

For me, being a writer was never a choice. I was born one. All through my childhood I wrote short stories and stuffed them in drawers. I wrote on everything. I didn't do my homework so I could write.
Laura Hillenbrand

And it was out in the theaters in two weeks. This is not, 'We're going to develop twenty-five and maybe one's going to get made,' so the first three things I wrote got up on the screen and, good, bad or indifferent, I got to see them on their feet.
John Sayles

The bands that wrote the big, heroic rock songs - I really wanted to make a record like that.
Sheryl Crow

I knew that if I wrote a new book every six months or every year, if I continued to read great books, eventually I would write something worthy of publication. I understood I might be in my forties or my fifties or even my sixties, but I felt confident that it would happen.
Augusten Burroughs

I'm the guy who wrote The Authority Song. Did they think I was kidding? Did they think it was only a song to entertain?
John Mellencamp

I've always said, since I got to know him and wrote about him, that he's the generation he least appeals to is his own and I think in many ways he was born middle-aged and that's become apparent in recent years.
Anthony Holden

I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try.
Howard Nemerov

My brother used to say that I wrote faster than he could read. He wrote two books - of poems - better than all mine put together.
Laurence Housman

The book, you understand, was not written for publication. It was the portrayal of my emotions, the analysis of my own soul life during three months of my nineteenth year. I wrote then all the time, just as I do now, but, though the book is in diary form, it is not a diary.
Mary MacLane

While Fledging is a different type of book, The Parable series serve as cautionary tales. I wrote the Parable books because of the direction of the country. You can call it save the world fiction, but it clearly doesn't save anything.
Octavia Butler

The first comedy screenplay that I wrote was Animal House and I always thought I could and should be a director but no one was about to give me that opportunity on Animal House.
Harold Ramis

I wrote that song for my wife, and it's what some guy who's sitting under a tree would be singing to the woman of his life, telling her how wonderful she is. To me, that's more lasting than something that sounds like it belongs on a movie soundtrack.
John Fogerty