Writing Format Quotes & Sayings

You can write when you're dyslexic, you just can't read it. But I started writing short stories as a child and I found the short story format a real nice one. I love short stories and I love short documentaries or short films of any kind. — Billy Bob Thornton

The Revolution won't be televised. It's already available on Amazon in ebook format. — Kenya Wright

Readership is highly dependent upon format and distribution as much as it is on content. — Sara Sheridan

The black person entered the booth one person and emerged on the other side a new, transfigured person. — Desmond Tutu

For me, while writing I am an engineer, so if I decide to change the format, I want to add a section, to move a section, reorganize the section, anything I want to do, I just boot words, and I do what I want to do. So, I feel completely empowered when I'm a writer. — Guy Kawasaki

you. Devlin and I will take our chances on the run." They rode on in silence, speeding west toward Phoenix now, a massive, distant glow on the horizon, like a city on fire. — Blake Crouch

Storytelling entails weaving a narrative out of the disturbing, strange, inspirational, and unremarkable detritus of life. By picking among the litter of our personal experiences to select evocative anecdotes to weave into a narrative format, we reveal which of life's legendary offerings prove the most sublime to us. Acts of omission are momentous. Our narration of personal sketches divulge what factoids inspire us or do not stir us into action, or contain obdurate truths that prove virtually impossible to crack. — Kilroy J. Oldster

We don't work in the traditional TV format where we're like writing concurrently to shooting. Like, we really view it as a large feature film. — Jay Duplass

Sometimes it takes being at your lowest point to see who's really there for you. And they're all standing right beside me now. The — A. Zavarelli

We must carefully cultivate the voice that speaks to us because an internal voice is the ultimate narrator of our charming and delightful personal story or the documentarian of our tragic and disgraceful plotlines. Stories that we tell ourselves become our functional reality, which format structures the concourse of the nested emotional control panel that guides and girds us through the din of the present. — Kilroy J. Oldster

This river is so old. When the Nephilim walked the land and men were like grasshoppers at their feet, it was flashing as thin and quick as a minnow. — Kristopher Reisz

Regarding pushing the form, ideas interest me more than form. I think you can write a very subversive play in a three-act structure. The content makes the play. I feel the form is simply dressing, because ultimately, you want to communicate to the audience, and sometimes the best way to do that is to present a provocative idea in a format that is comfortable for them to receive. Then the idea will come through directly, right in solar plexus. After all, I want to make a living as an artist, and that means speaking to the audience in a form they can understand. — Caridad Svich

Have the utmost respect for your subjects. Love them. — Joyce Tenneson

I am completely unflustered by whichever medium people choose to read my words. I'm just delighted they're reading them at all! — Sara Sheridan

I'm encouraging these women, like Cheryl Strayed, to take the jump to writing for the screen. She is adapting her book Tiny Beautiful Things for us. They're infinitely capable of tackling the format. — Reese Witherspoon

The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up. — Henry Louis Gates

We didn't want to worry about the formula that has been implanted into our brains - this verse/pre-chorus/chorus format. When we were writing 'The Papercut Chronicles,' we had no idea about any of that. We didn't know how to count bars or how to write what's considered a well-formatted pop song. — Travie McCoy

You have to get off that finite road that you've created from your transitional standpoint and onto the path of light. Onto the infinite road of eternal existence, the firm foundation of truth. This is where the crooked becomes straight, the lost get found, the blind see, and the dead live. Where the tangible reasoning of logical man loses credibility and is proven unrealistic. Where faith becomes active and the world of the supernatural becomes obvious. You have to accept Jesus. Accept it, accept Jesus. — Calvin W. Allison

Writing books isn't a drastic departure from writing for the stage. I've always written in the long format, five, eight, 10-minute pieces rather than one-liners, so since writing books, the process hasn't changed much. A piece in my live routine can end up as part of one of my HBO specials, and it can also end up in one of the books. — George Carlin

Over recent years I had increasingly lost faith in literature. I read and thought this is something someone has made up. Perhaps it was because we were totally inundated with fiction and stories... All these millions of paperbacks, hardbacks, DVDs and TV series, they were all about made-up people in a made-up, though realistic, world. And news in the press, TV news and radio news had exactly the same format, documentaries had the same format, they were also stories, and it made no difference whether what they told had actually happened or not...

Fictional writing has no value, documentary narrative has no value. The only genres I saw value in, which still conferred meaning, were diaries and essays, the types of literature that did not deal with narrative, that were not about anything, but just consisted of a voice, the voice of your own personality, a life, a face, a gaze you could meet. What is a work of art if not the gaze of another person? — Karl Ove Knausgard

Plato used the dialogue format because the exchange of views, the posing and answering of questions, showed that understanding is a living, dynamic process. He distrusted writing because the settled character of the written word makes it look as if truth can be fixed and made to stand still. It is worth remembering that this greatest advocate of the objective reality of truth also believed that our access to that truth was sustained in reasoned discussion. — John Churchill, 1st Duke Of Marlborough

Sometimes I write songs that just come out in a pop format because I grew up on melody and these amazing artists during the 80s. It's my tradition and it's something that I can't really control. — Robyn

In all cases love was a strong emotion, not easily contained once it was unleashed. I realized now that love was like a blossoming flower that continually added more and more petals. But there was no end point. There was no full bloom. It went on forever. Growing, strengthening. — Rachel Hawthorne

I always wanted to write, even before I realized that there was a comedy writers' world, or what that life was like. I never thought of myself, at least as a little kid, in terms of being the onscreen talent. I always thought it'd be so much fun to write sketches and be a writer. Even as little as 6 or 7, that's what my main interest was. — Mindy Kaling

MTV is to music as KFC is to chicken! — Lewis Black

When you're writing in big block paragraphs, you can afford to have a redundant sentence now and then, but the Twitter format requires concision. — Anthony Marra

When I looked into the lives of the Chinese saints, I discovered that many of them had died during the Boxer Rebellion, a war that occurred on Chinese soil in the year 1900. — Gene Luen Yang

The war had changed him, inside and out, in ways he could never have fathomed. — Miranda Liasson

Total commitment," I said. "You know, the idea of discovering something that, for all intents and purposes, goes against your abilities, and yet still deciding to do it anyway. That takes guts, you know? — Sarah Dessen

By the time I wrote those first three songs for his new CD ... I wanted to push the poetics as hard as I could push them, and not decide the songs were finished until I committed them to whatever the recording format was. I went through drafts right up until I recorded every single one of them ... — Steve Earle

It's a funny thing because it's what the people say when they come across a ghost situation is that it does freak you out, but then you do get over it - for some reason you're not scared to come across it again. — Rhys Darby