Writing Influence Quotes

The love of writing comes at a very early age. For me, for instance, comic books so affected me. And a lot of people who come up to me and start talking about writing, when I start talking to them about the "Fantastic Four," they look at me aghast. They say, "'The Fantastic Four?' That's not literature." I say, "Yeah, but it was when I was 11 years old." This was literature.

I think I'm influenced a lot by Drake in specific ways in my writing.

It's hard to say if actual places really affect the way you write.

Listen, here's the thing about an English degree - if you sat somebody down and asked them to make a list of the writers they admire over the last hundred years, see how many of them got a degree in English.

Norbert Blei is a writer the way people used to be troubadours and minstrels, celebrating what he has seen and heart and felt in a deceptively simple style reminiscent of the early Sherwood Anderson. . . . Like Anderson, he is a lover, and his affection invests his writing with a singular charm.

There was a time when I thought I turned terrible things over in my mind because I read and wrote too many scary stories. (Note self: start writing about unicorns and bunnies)

I don't know if nature is a direct literary influence on my writing, but it is certainly important to me. I take great joy in writing about it. It is something I have taken with me from my childhood; the body exposed to the threat of the physical world and at the same time being at home in it.

I'd dearly love to write a political book that changed the hearts and minds of men and women.

I think as the world changes, we have to keep up. We have to note what is happening, and I think writing has always had a powerful corrective influence and possibility. We have to write about what's good, and we also have to write about parts of our culture that are not good, that are not working out. I think it takes a new eye.

The most important thing when you study hypnosis is that you learn that humans are irrational. Until you understand that, hypnosis is hard to do... For me, it was this great awakening to understand that humans are deeply irrational, and it's probably the greatest influence on me in terms of my writing.

Propaganda has a bad name, but its root meaning is simply to disseminate through a medium, and all writing therefore is propaganda for something. It's a seeding of the self in the consciousness of others.

I believe that writing is derivative. I think good writing comes from good reading.

I think there are some writers - like, if you read Kerouac, I think you probably need to take a little break before you sit down to the typewriter because he's the type of writer whose voice infects you.

When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.

The biggest influence on my writing, besides snagging some ideas about black humor, was that the paper mill had a program where they paid 75 percent of the tuition and book [costs] for employees who wanted to go to college part-time.

My natural tendency is to write about zombie bunnies, but one of my first writing teachers got incorporated into my writing superego, and I keep hearing his admonition to make things feel more real the weirder they get.

Movies have influenced all writers, not just thriller writers.

I realized later how much my acting experience influenced my writing and how it helped me to write for other actors.

No poem was ever written by a drinker of water.

I don't suppose a writing man ever really gets rid of his old crocus-yellow neckties. Sooner or later, I think, they show up in his prose, and there isn't a hell of a lot he can do about it.

No one I interact with - except maybe for family and strangers at the Russian baths and other weird places I may go to - is just friends or lovers with me: they also know something of my writing and this distorts their take on me.

The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.

I believe that, like most writers, my personality comes through in the fiction. So in that respect my writing can't be like any other author's really.

If you're mostly a writer - if your point of departure is writing something - which for a writer/director is sort of where you start, you're really influenced by the writers you love one way or another.

I really learned how to write from Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Trollope, and de Maupassant.