A Quote by Eric Idle

When we graduated [ from Cambridge], we were grabbed right into television. I was grabbed straight into the practice of writing comedy. It was all writing and performing. You wrote something in order for you to perform it.
I grabbed her, right there outside the lunch room in the swarming mob. I didn't care if others were watching. In fact, i hoped they were. I grabbed her and squeezed her. I had never been so happy and so proud in my life.
I've been writing for a long time, since the late '60s. But it hasn't been in the same form. I used to write scripts for television. I wrote for my comedy act. Then I wrote screenplays, and then I started writing New Yorker essays, and then I started writing plays. I didn't start writing prose, really, until the New Yorker essays, but they were comic. I didn't start writing prose, really, until the '90s. In my head, there was a link between everything. One thing led to another.
I'd enjoy it if a guy grabbed my ass. I guess it all depends on how he grabbed it, too.
I studied writing at NYU. I graduated high school in Nashville and then went to the creative writing program, and in the first year, that's when I wrote 'Kids.'
When I graduated, I was director of my school's sketch comedy group, and I knew that I wanted to be writing and performing my own sketch comedy. It kind of made me want to do my own one-person sketch group.
I've been a comedian for a long time so writing and performing is a big part of what I do. If anybody's doing comedy they should also work on writing.
Writing was always a laborious thing for me. I never wrote fluently, I never wrote fluidly, there was something very awkward in my writing. But it seemed to me purposely awkward. It's almost as if I made the labor part of writing.
I figure I wrote 37 songs in 20 years, and that's not exactly a full-time job. It wasn't that I was writing and writing and writing and quit. Every now and then I wrote something, and every now and then I didn't. The second just outnumbered the first.
Right now I'm sick of acting, so it's like, Maybe I'll do writing for a bit. Then, when I'm tired of writing, I'll go work on my music. When I'm sick of music, I'll be like, I'm going to start performing comedy now. So it's good. It's not like I want to be famous or anything.
I came out with a book called The True Secret of Writing: Connecting Life with Language. It's a book that describes how writing is a practice and how my teaching is part of that practice. I direct the writing and create books but underneath, there's always the river of practice happening. No good, no bad. Just do it.
Sandeep Jauhar’s Doctored is a passionate and necessary book that asks difficult questions about the future of medicine. The narrative is gripping, and the writing is marvelous. But it was the gravity of the problem—so movingly told—that grabbed and kept my attention throughout this remarkable work.
Write all the time. I believe in writing every day, at least a thousand words a day. We have a strange idea about writing: that it can be done, and done well, without a great deal of effort. Dancers practice every day, musicians practice every day, even when they are at the peak of their careers – especially then. Somehow, we don’t take writing as seriously. But writing – writing wonderfully – takes just as much dedication.
The Bible is a collection of writings by lots of different people written over maybe a thousand years, from a number of centuries before Jesus to a century after Jesus. I often like to refer to it as "the Scriptures" to make that point about it being lots of writings that were originally separate. What these writings have in common is that "the Old Testament" is writings that grabbed the Jewish people; writings that convinced them that they were God's word to them. And "the New Testament" is writings that grabbed people who believed in Jesus in the same way.
I do think reading is the best practice for writing, along with writing all the time. I actually never liked writing on my own or in school until I'd had my blog for a while and realized I'd been writing every day for years.
Thoughts are created in the act of writing. [It is a myth that] you must have something to say in order to write. Reality: You often need to write in order to have anything to say. Thought comes with writing, and writing may never come if it is postponed until we are satisfied that we have something to say...The assertion of write first, see what you had to say later applies to all manifestations of written language, to letters...as well as to diaries and journals
When people speak to me of the torment of writing, I can think only of what it was like before I wrote: once writing meant writing and not thinking about writing, I knew nothing of any torment.
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