Quotes About Inspiration

I am influenced by books which don't have their eye on the endgame, but which try to be entertaining on each and every page.

I like to write books that I would have liked as a child, that would have got me thinking and imagining beyond the words on the page. In a way, my audience is always how I remember myself as a child.

I don't write for an auditorium full of people. I don't write for the microphone; I write for the page.

My sketchbooks are usually just a line on one page or a circle, which to most people must be totally meaningless. But to me, they are very important to the thing I am working on.

Ignore all advice about writing. Leave your blood on every page. Every page!

The good news, when you write with another, is that you never have an empty page in front of you. The bad news is... you never have an empty page in front of you.

When I think about the books I've written, it probably takes 150,000-200,000 words to get a 50,000 page book. Highlighting something and hitting Cmd-X is second nature.

Whether it is television or film, the character on the page has to speak to me.

Spend more time working before you write page one. Then, the story - at least parts of it - will feel as though it is writing itself.

What's on the page dictates a lot of what I do. When the words are there, it's easy.

I see a lot of scripts, and very few of them leap off the page at you.

If I can get a page out in a day, I am celebrating.

I want to be Geraldine Page; I want to be one of the greats.

In the midst of observing the world and coming to consciousness, I was becoming a writer, and what I wanted to put on the page were the stories of people who looked like me.

The first time I joined the gym was during the Miss Sri Lanka pageant in 2006. Then, I went for the Miss Universe contest where I was exposed to girls who were very fit for their age. They could have joined the Olympics. They were doing crazy exercises.

I continually blacken pages and scribble away, so I always have a number of songs that are half-finished.

I find interesting characters or lessons that resonate with people and sometimes I write about them in the sports pages, sometimes I write them in a column, sometimes in a novel, sometimes a play or sometimes in nonfiction. But at the core I always say to myself, 'Is there a story here? Is this something people want to read?'

I outline fairly extensively because I'm usually dealing with real events. I don't need to give myself as much information as I used to, but I still like to have two pages of outline for every projected 100 pages of manuscript.

I met Charlie Trotter before I actually saw him in person; I was 24 when I first opened the pages of Charlie's cookbook 'Charlie Trotter's' and was greeted by a man I would know and admire for the next 20 years.

We don't sit down and look at the news pages and think, 'How could we do an episode about that?'

It took me nine months to write 60 pages. It was very frustrating.

And when I'm writing, I write a lot anyway. I might write pages and pages of conversation between characters that don't necessarily end up in the book, or in the story I'm working on, because they're simply my way of getting to know the characters.

So I thought I should write five pages a day. And that's what I did. Eventually I had a book.

There are writers, and I know some of them, who are very disciplined. Who write, like, four pages a day, every day. And it doesn't matter if their dog got run over by a car that day, or they won the Irish sweepstakes. I'm not one of those writers.