“I got the idea for the pilot while walking through an empty lot of a movie studio. There were all the evidences of a community but with no people. I felt at the time a kind of encroaching loneliness, and desolation; a feeling of how nightmarish it would be to wind up in a city with no inhabitants.”— Rod Serling, en.wikiquote.org
“...a medium best suited to illumine and dramatize the issues of the times has its product pressed into a mold, painted lily-white, and has its dramatic teeth yanked out one by one.”— Rod Serling, rodserling.com
“Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull.”— Rod Serling, goodreads.com
“The writer in any field, and particularly the television writer, runs into dry periods—weeks or months when it seems that everything he writes goes the rounds and ultimately gets nowhere. This is not only a bad moment but an endless one. I remember a five-month period late in 1952 when my diet consi…”— Rod Serling, goodreads.com
“In eleven or twelve years of writing, Mike, I can lay claim to at least this: I have never written beneath myself. I have never written anything that I didn't want my name attached to. I have probed deeper in some scripts and I've been more successful in some than others. But all of them that have b…”— Rod Serling, rodserling.com
“The writer's role is to menace the public's conscience. He must have a position, a point of view. He must see the arts as a vehicle of social criticism and he must focus on the issues of his time.”— Rod Serling, books.google.com
“If you write, fix pipes, grade papers, lay bricks or drive a taxi—do it with a sense of pride. And do it the best you know how. Be cognizant and sympathetic to the guy alongside, because he wants a place in the sun, too. And always...always look past his color, his creed, his religion and the shape…”— Rod Serling, goodreads.com
“In any case, rather like priests who have forgotten the meaning of the prayers they chant, we shall go on for quite a long time talking of books and writing books, pretending all the while not to notice that the church is empty and the parishioners have gone elsewhere to attend other gods, perhaps i…”— Gore Vidal, amazon.com
“One can never rely on the great keeping one's letters; and should those letters vanish, one is apt to be remembered only as the mysterious half of a dialogue to be reconstructed in the vaguest way from the surviving (and sometimes lesser!) half of the exchange.”— Gore Vidal, amazon.com
“We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.”— John Fowles, amazon.com
“I’m not against sentimentality. I think you need it. I mean, I don’t think you get a true picture of people without it in writing… It’s a kind of poetry, it’s an emotional poetry, and, to bring it back to the literary scene, I don’t think anything is true that doesn’t have it, that doesn’t have poet…”— Nelson Algren, amazon.com
“I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.”— Flannery O’Connor, goodreads.com
“For certainly it is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his reader is sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words, or his reader will certainly misunderstand them.”— John Ruskin, amazon.com
“I may turn out an intellectual, but I’ll never write anything but mediocre poetry.”— F. Scott Fitzgerald, amazon.com
“Why does one begin to write? Because she feels misunderstood, I guess. Because it never comes out clearly enough when she tries to speak. Because she wants to rephrase the world, to take it in and give it back again differently, so that everything is used and nothing is lost. Because it’s something…”— Nicole Krauss, amazon.com
“I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.”— Robert Louis Stevenson, amazon.com
“The mind travels faster than the pen; consequently, writing becomes a question of learning to make occasional wing shots, bringing down the bird of thought as it flashes by. A writer is a gunner, sometimes waiting in the blind for something to come in, sometimes roaming the countryside hoping to sca…”— E. B. White, amazon.com