Tom Stoppard Quotes

When I write, I'm talking to myself constantly to make sure that it sounds OK; it has kind of a nice rhythm and a nice jump to it.

I don't fiddle or edit or change while I'm going through that first draft.

There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.

As a writer, I can't really take days off. Writing is like creating an art. Once you stop writing, you can lose your rhythm and context, meaning that your writing may lose its power.

There are a lot of elements when you're writing, or when I'm writing, that are sitting in the back of your mind. I try to let them stay there, because they find their way in more naturally that way.

I don't work in a straight line. I don't write with an outline. I write where I can see things happen, and then things get glued together.

I don't consciously think of any certain direction when I'm writing. I only try not to be repetitive or redundant.

To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music that words make.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

Write in a disciplined manner, but write in a way that is natural to the individual's thought processes.

The elegance and the quality - the talent is always in the literature. I start with the word and I base everything on that. It doesn't make any difference to me.

I mean, if you lined up 100 writers, you'd get 100 different ways in which they write. There's no right way or wrong way to do it; it's whatever your process is.

What makes me write is the rhythm of the world around me - the rhythms of the language, of course, but also of the land, the wind, the sky, other lives. Before the words comes the rhythm - that seems to me to be of the essence.

I don't write drafts. I write from the beginning to the end, and when it's finished, it's done.

Nobody sits down and says, 'Well, I'm going to write a bad book.' They sit down to write a great book, but it doesn't always turn out like that. The writer may do his best and still write a so-so book, and other times, it just flows easily. But I don't know how you can control that.

It's always struck me as unfair that writing has so little sensation when it's going well.

No, absolutely not, writing doesn't have to be like a jigsaw puzzle, it can be a very linear undertaking.

I just let the character speak to me and things appear.

Writing for 'Rooster' was a strange experience. It's funny, once you tap into a voice, words just start to flow. You know when you've hit a spirit or captured something.

Everything I write doesn't appear to be biography until later. I often say that I've never written about anything I've experienced. Of course, that's not true. But it doesn't appear familiar to me at all. And maybe that's because I have to be in a kind of coma in order to write. If it appeared familiar, I wouldn't.

Column writing is like gas - it fills the available space.

I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like child stringing beads in kindergarten, - happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.

I don't card out my screenplays ever. I just have an idea I just sit down and write I don't edit.

I think people who create and write, it actually does flow-just flows from into their head, into their hand, and they write it down. It's simple.

The material came bubbling up inside like a geyser or an oil gusher. It streamed up of its own accord, down my arm and out of my fountain pen in a torrent of six thousand words a day.