A Quote by David Leavitt

The Term Paper Artist' represents two models of writing, one of the little boy bouncing his ball, generating stories for the sheer pleasure of it, and the besieged adult, writing to make a living, having to contend with a very competitive, very unreliable world in which public image counts.

David Leavitt

Quote Topics

Adult Artist Ball Bouncing Boy Competitive Contend Counts Generating Having His Image Little Living Make Models Paper Pleasure Public Public Image Represents Sheer Stories Term Term Paper Two Unreliable Very Which World Writing

Quote Author

David Leavitt
American - Novelist
Born: June 23, 1961

Screenplays are not writing. They're a fake form of writing. It's a lot of dialogue and very little atmosphere. Very little description. Very little character work. It's very dangerous. You'll never learn to write.

Ray Bradbury

Writing is hard work. Generating stories that catch people's attention and holding it are very difficult.

David Ogden Stiers

Journalism is very much public writing, writing with an audience in mind, writing for publication, and frequently writing quickly. And I know that when I worked daily journalism it really affected my patience with literature, which I think requires reflection, and a different kind of engagement.

Achy Obejas

Then the writing became so fluid that I sometimes felt as if I were writing for the sheer pleasure of telling a story, which may be the human condition that most resembles levitation.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Acting is more fun than writing. Writing is harder, more like having a term paper.

Owen Wilson

When you look at the sheer volume of paper usage in the U.S. alone, it's truly frightening: paper towels, toilet paper, napkins, writing paper. Our consumption of trees is endless.

Ian Somerhalder

I was a confident, outgoing little boy. If you're an only child, you're living in a very linguistically adult world, and you've got to keep up. So I did. Maybe I was slightly annoying.

Jack Davenport

Because my writing time has always been very limited, I try to be very choosy about which stories I work on. There are many ideas that would make interesting stories - too many - so it's important to be ruthless and say no to most of them.

Ken Liu

I'm always writing. A friend of mine once said, 'You avoid re-writing by writing.' Which is kind of a good point, because re-writing seems to be mostly about craft, and writing is just, like, getting out your passion on a piece of paper.

Cameron Crowe

I was very in my own head as a kid. But I liked it there! I was just writing poetry, writing stories, writing plays. I think I was quite strange. But I was happy.

Arlo Parks

I started by writing short stories, but they weren't very good; I tried them on various magazines, and none of them was published. People were nicer then about turning you down, and so I didn't lose heart - I kept on writing and wrote a lot of books, one or two of which I finished, and others I didn't.

Ruth Rendell

I started writing the one-sentence stories when I was translating 'Swann's Way.' There were two reasons. I had almost no time to do my own writing, but didn't want to stop. And it was a reaction to Proust's very long sentences.

Lydia Davis

Writing for myself and writing for another artist are two very different experiences. When I handle both the story and the art, I have full control. I can endlessly tweak every word and every line.

Gene Luen Yang

I started writing the book without realizing I was writing a book. That sounds stupid, but it's true. I'd been trying and failing to make a different manuscript work, and I thought I was just taking a break by writing some short stories. I'm not a very good short story writer - the amazing compression that is required for short stories doesn't come easily to me. But anyway, I thought I'd try to write some short stories. And a structure took shape - I stumbled upon it.

Ayana Mathis

I try to make statements that aren't broad because that doesn't make for good writing. I don't get commentary as my job, because I'm not very good at that. The way I do it is by writing songs, and I have to be small; I have to make the stories a bit personal.