Written Quotations | Page 3

With Dick Smith there, and the words of Peter Shaffer... they've got to be the most beautiful descriptions in music ever written on film or in literature. And we could hear the music accompanying the words... What more can you ask for?

I grew up not having very many girl friends. Girls tend to be competitive. I actually went to the school 'Mean Girls' was written about, so you can only imagine what my high school experience was like!

A scientist worthy of a lab coat should be able to make original discoveries while wearing a clown suit, or give a lecture in a high squeaky voice from inhaling helium. It is written nowhere in the math of probability theory that one may have no fun.

I've written a book; I've become a better husband and father because I'm home every day. My connection to the Hollywood world has only been through Facebook.

The so-called lessons of history are for the most part the rationalizations of the victors. History is written by the survivors.

When the written and spoken word is censored, the urban landscape becomes a nation's only physical link to the past.

I don't think the western world is questioning capitalism. Capitalism as a concept is not something that society has written off. But today, there is degree of caution around capitalism. We believe in compassionate capitalism. Growth for growth's sake can never be an end in itself.

Well, the very best operas are the ones written by the very best composers.

I haven't written about an immigrant experience because I haven't experienced that before and am focused on existential themes.

The real reason Jews don't have more Hanukkah music is that, historically, American Jewish singer-songwriters were too busy making Christmas music. 'White Christmas,' 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,' 'Silver Bells' and 'The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting)' were all written by Jews.

I have written some of the clumsiest, most clogged-yet-vagrant, hobbledehoyish, hitch-slipping sentences ever conceived by the human mind.

We did it. Make no mistake: We have written history. Today there's a change of guards in Denmark.

It is very annoying - things have been written by people who didn't know me at all or Princess Diana. They were written by people who never knew me or met me. It did make me angry. I just stopped reading the papers.

Every book is like starting over again. I've written books every way possible - from using tight outlines to writing from the seat of my pants. Both ways work.

My best chance is that, in a happy moment, I hit upon St Francis as the subject for a series of plays. Others might have written them better: but, as I have written them, the advantage will probably remain mine.

I do not mean for one second to suggest that 'White Doves at Morning' was written with a movie deal in mind. Certainly not.

I've always been a pretty hard worker. That's how I've written over a hundred books.

When I'd written my 'Silverwing' series - I'd imbued the bats with full human awareness and vocabulary.

'Gatekeeper' was sort of my first attempt to put a little bit of a frame and boundaries around songwriting, and try to figure out a way to approach it that had a sort of end result in mind. I haven't written many like that.

I look at 'Love Child' and it's as if it was written by someone else - someone who knew what they were doing.

I've never written a play before, and I'll never write one again. You can quote me.

None of this was written to hurt anybody's feelings.

I've written songs about things that nobody else has ever written about.

There's only one set of books I've written that I knew was going to be more than one book at the beginning, and those are the 'Missing Link' books.

In my mind, every single female character I've written is plus-size.

The only description for Nolan in the script was that he's a very bad dresser. I put on a red windbreaker and every other ugly, ill-fitting thing I could dig out. He was potentially written as a clean-cut nerd, but I wanted a darker spin.

If you're writing a song, you have to write something that can be understood serially. When you're reading a poem that's written for the page, your eye can skip up and down. You can see the thing whole. But you're not going to see the thing whole in the song. You're going to hear it in series, and you can't skip back.

The first two books that I did by myself were long stories in verse. I knew I could do that because I'd written a lot in verse. But, verse stories are hard to sell, so my editor encouraged me to try writing in prose.

I don't see that books can be written without political context - not if they're relevant and ambitious.

I get up around 8 o'clock, which gives me enough time to walk dogs and feed chickens and horses. Then I get to work in my home office upstairs, and basically, I don't stop until I've written 2,000 words and/or the Stephen Colbert show is over.

I've always written about people who have very abstracted in a certain way. I write about scientists and artists and musicians. I write about people who live in their heads who are very obsessed about a certain set of details in the physical world.

I worked initially in very low-budget independent films that I often wrote. My early work was all written by myself, and then I adapted 'Tsotsi,' so I was used to the writing process being, in a way, integral to my directing. I felt it really prepared me.

I had written children's books for 14 years before I published 'Wicked.' And none of them were poorly reviewed, and none of them sold enough for me to be able to buy a bed.

Nothing I had written before 'Mary Poppins' had anything to do with children, and I have always assumed, when I thought about it at all, that she had come out of the same wall of nothingness as the poetry, myth and legend that had absorbed me all my writing life.

I've always written about things that cause me to feel something.

I started writing because it was hard to find acting jobs. I didn't like any monologues in auditions, so I started to write my own things. Since then, I have written a couple of shows. I was nominated for playwright of the year for a play I wrote called 'Potential Space.'

I find that the most interestingly written parts happen to be the bad guys.

I remember all the way back in high school thinking about writing books. And, in fact, I've written a lot of stories. I've got dozens of stories I've written that no one's ever seen.

The way 'The Icarus Girl' came about was by me just basically bragging it with a literary agent and telling him I'd written 150 pages when I'd only written 20. And I think it was when the agent e-mailed me back right the very next day after sending him the 20 pages and asking to see the other 130.

I'm a huge Cure fan. I love the Cure. The scales being tipped to when they weren't on a major label compared to when they were seems pretty meaningless. I had the good fortune of having them go before me and seeing their careers, musically at least, lose something. Like a novel written by a dead hand.

In terms of age, I think I've covered about as wide a range as is possible, having written everything from picture books to early chapter books to middle grade novels to YA to one adult novel - and having been editor and lead writer for a magazine for retired people!

It was really written as most, I think, books are by writers - for themselves. There was something that just had to be written, in a way that it had to be written. If you know what I mean.

I think I would have written more books if I'd had fewer kids or had them earlier, but I think the books in general would have had a little less spark to them.

Having written both comedy and drama, comedy's harder because the fear of failure's so much stronger. When you write a scene and you see it cut together, and it doesn't make you laugh, it hurts in a way that failed drama doesn't. Failed drama, it's all, 'That's not that compelling,' but failed comedy just lays there.

I have written stories since I was a child.

I have never written a book about my life, despite being offered purses of gold. I made 'Boxes' because I wanted to make a sincere depiction of a daughter who has lost her father, or the jealousy one can feel towards a daughter who has become more beautiful than you and whose stepfather starts to take her shopping.

There is no way that the Fourth Gospel was written by John Zebedee or by any of the disciples of Jesus. The author of this book is not a single individual, but is at least three different writers/editors, who did their layered work over a period of 25 to 30 years.

I've never written a song that I thought was a hit.

I've done episodic television and some other things that have been written by other people.

To have a song work for the movie, it can't just be written apart and shoved in. It's got to come out of the action. It's got to talk about the characters, not the story: it has to augment that action.

When Byrd came out of there, he had written a lot things while he was in the hospital.

My first big one-person show was basically a combination of my family, me during puberty, embarrassing newspaper articles that were written about me in high school, my first modeling photos, and terrible things that people said about me on the Internet.

When I'm drawing, I only do that at home, really, at my drawing table. But writing I could do in other places. So I've written in airports, in hotels, different places.

I write everywhere. I've written books while I was on planes, at Disney World, and in multiple countries of which I am not a native. It can be a struggle to make word count sometimes, but I will persevere!

We had been working. We had a bunch of songs written and it came time to make the record, so we had our lawyer make the call to Elektra and ask for our advance. Then, we got dropped. It was actually exciting.

There are some fine books and essays about that. Lewis Hyde has written about alcoholism and poets and the role that society gives its writers - encouraging them to die.

Occasionally I write a small piece or the odd lecture in English, and I teach in English, but my fiction is always written in German.

There's always a time when you think you've done your last song or you've written your last rap or, you know, people are not checking for you.

The Word of God is so much broader than people are giving it credit for. Look at Proverbs, a book written on how to live.

In the Great Mongol Empire, Mongols governed by a written law called the 'Ih Zasag,' which is translated as 'the Great Order.' It was an era when the Mongols strove to establish a new world order, thus, justice, peace and cooperation in their relations with other states and peoples.

Any sufficiently badly-written science is indistinguishable from magic.

It's bad writing, however naturalistic it's written, that's where you have to do your best acting.

All the people I have written about remain with me - perhaps they are my closest friends.

When I die Dublin will be written in my heart.

Before journalism, I had worked doing medical aid work in conflict zones. Then, as a journalist, I had written about hospitals in war zones.

Playing live is closer to theatre, although when you're up there on your own, it's quite scary and revealing because you're playing your own songs. It's like a one man show that you've written yourself.

I do have a sister. I have never written much about sisters before. I am very close to my sister, but, maybe, because we are very close, it never occurred to me to write about her.

I feel that these stories are being written to articulate certain confusions and disappointments, and I do mean to shake up the reader, and I do hope they're on target.

Anyone who wants to know who I am can just read my lyrics - I've always written about who I am.

It's been a long time since I've written old-fashioned sword and sorcery; I'm hoping it's like riding a bicycle.

I think I've written about family and things in 'Taipei' which could be considered Asian culture.

And I think it's very rare to have good stories, well written comedies.

I like the idea of taking a true classic written by a true genius and destroying it essentially! I like the idea of bringing it down to earth a bit - and even a bit lower than that.

If I manage to write something that I consider good and valuable in a particular place, that spot automatically has a special aura for me. In Albania, there are two cities where I have written the majority of my work: Gjirokaster, my home city, and Tirana.

The world is littered with constitutions that have written guarantees of rights but that don't actually deliver rights. What differentiates the ones where rights are real from where rights are fake is that it's in the initial interests of the majority to actually deliver these rights.

Studios, because they are investing a great deal of money in movies, they want a guarantee that when they hire somebody that person can deliver for them. Everything is fear based, so they pigeonhole people. But I've written everything, from Westerns to sci-fi to dramedy, I've done it all.

Many of the things that I have written on have focused, at least a big part of the story, on adolescents. I think that in that period of life, so much happens, and it's the period of life where you're forming into an adult. In certain ways, you're already an adult and in certain ways you're still a kid.

Judy Blume especially sort of broke the boundaries of what is appropriate and what should be written about - what teenagers are actually doing.

'Tom Sawyer' could have been written eight months ago, with the kind of response it still gets.

To me not one thing is better than anything else, I'm completely proud of everything I've written and recorded.

I have written every one of my novels to convince somebody of something.

Well, 'The Wellspring' was written from 1983 to 1986. And it had a section in the beginning that was poems that began from others' experience.

Having written for film and television, I had little interest in turning 'The Good Father' into a Hollywood thriller. I was writing a novel, and novels demand that the writer goes deeper, both emotionally and thematically.

Mary Queen of Scots is the most 'normal' girl who became a queen that I have ever written about.

'Filk' is the folk music of the science fiction and fantasy community - you get parodies, you get traditional music that's had the words slightly modified, and you'll also get just original works that have been written about science fiction and fantasy works, or with science fiction and fantasy themes.

It's funny; Luther and I have written many songs together, but we've never written songs in the same room.

'Watchmen' is like the music you feel is written just for you. 'That's my song, no one else gets that but me.' That's why the fan base is so rabid, because they feel personal about it.

A constitutional tradition that works is one that is in a constant state of dynamic evolution. You have a written constitution that says 'x,' but no constitutional system works if it just follows what's in that written constitution and never changes. Interpretation gives it the freedom to change.

We have a maxim in the House of Commons, and written on the walls of our houses, that old ways are the safest and surest ways.

If you look at NBC, two of their most successful shows - '30 Rock' and 'Parks And Rec' - are written by women, produced by women, and I think that's the future. Women are the new men.

I have written my own screen version of Pern, but had no buyers yet.

This time all the historical details and things were right. But I'd written it again in third person, and people found it dry. I decided to throw that one away.

One book at a time... though I'm usually doing the research for others while I'm writing, but that sort of research is fairly desultory and I like to stick to the book being written - and writing a book concentrates the mind so the research is more productive.

I've written probably over 200 songs that have a verse and a chorus and that's it.

I don't think anyone has written a great graphic novel.

But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet.

I don't think I could have written what I did any earlier.

In my free time, I'd written 'Sammy's Hill' - it had started out as a play. I just did it for myself.

I've written songs sober and I've written songs high.

I became hooked on 'In Treatment,' which was so finely written and performed. Such a simple idea, and yet it delved into very complex territory with real grace and humanity.