Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I envy those writers who outline their novels, who know where they're going. But I find writing is a process of discovery.
Wait, wait, wait, wait. Don't try to write through it, to force it. Many do, but that won't work. Just wait, it will come.
A forbidden writing is thought to be a certain spark of truth, that flies up in the face of them who seek to tread it out.
The more familiar the world becomes, the less information your brain writes down, and the more quickly time seems to pass.
Be a collector of good ideas. Keep a journal. If you hear a good idea, capture it, write it down. Don't trust your memory.
...at last I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had.
A lot of the experiences I write about could be described as grasping for boundaries, trying to find the limits of things.
I have a journalism degree, but I'd rather be the person who is being written about rather than the person who is writing.
If you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do is keep a pair of cats.
When I need to work up my nerve to write a tough column, I try to think of myself as Emma Peel in a black leather catsuit.
An abstract style is always bad. Your sentences should be full of stones, metals, chairs, tables, animals, men, and women.
I did write a letter to the archdiocese who'd banned the song, Only the Good Die Young, asking them to ban my next record.
I can write anywhere. I actually wrote more than I ever did when I had small children. My children were never a hindrance.
Melt all the guns, I thought, break the knives, burn the guillotines-and the malicious will still write letters that kill.
A great value of antiquity lies in the fact that its writings are the only ones that modern men still read with exactness.
If you are writing any book about the end of the world, what you are really writing about is what's worth saving about it.
He who writes carelessly confesses thereby at the very outset that he does not attach much importance to his own thoughts.
The best way to learn to write is to study the work of the men and women who are doing the kind of writing you want to do.
My resting pulse as a writer is writing idealistically and romantically; aspirationally. My taste lies in quixotic heroes.
I don't think comedians make an active decision to be a certain "persona." Comedians write the way they're going to write.
When you're writing, your mind has a place where the stories happen. With one word, you can get the idea of where you are.
I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.
When I'm writing, I look like a fool because the parts are moving through me and I'm crying and laughing and making faces.
Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.
Everything I write, I believe instinctively, is to some extent collage. Meaning, ultimately, is a matter of adjacent data.
Beginning writers must appreciate the prerequisites if they hope to become writers. You pay your dues - which takes years.
Always being myself and my salve, which is life. I’m not lonely, if that’s what it seems like. Always writing things down.
Nobody should be anything, but because I once had a different profession and I'm interested in writing, I took it upon me.
I lost my voice. I'd never had to cancel a show before and I had to walk around with a pad and a pen, writing things down.
This (writing) is the love of your life. It's what I want to do when I wake up. Nothing feels so absorbing, so fulfilling.
Writing is one way to go about thinking, and the practice and habit of writing not only drain the mind but supply it, too.
When I got home from The Ozzfest in September 2000 with Methods... I just locked myself in my house and I started writing.
Sometimes when relationships end, you write an e-mail and say everything you wish you said. Sometimes you don't push send.
When my mother makes out her income tax return every year, under occupation she writes, eroding my daughter's self-esteem.
Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.
I don't know how much longer I'll be around. I'll probably be writing when the Lord says, 'Maya, Maya Angelou, it's time.'
Lazy reviewers look up other people's reviews and they write the same thing, so you get people writing crap based on crap.
My son had toyed with the idea of writing and trying to write a little bit, so that kind of gave me the bug to write also.
I feel that I am writing out of a full life. I am a rich man, rich in men known, in adventures had. I am rich with living.
When I am gone what will you do? Who will write and draw for you? Someone smarter--someone new? Someone better--maybe YOU!
If Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker had teamed up to write epic fantasy, something like Split Heirs might have resulted.
I think some aspects of writing can be taught. Obviously, you can't teach vision or talent. But you can help with comfort.
We have such a young culture that there is an opportunity to contribute wonderful new myths to it, which will be accepted.
I feel guilty because I want to act more than I want to write songs. I'm a person who likes to transition; I like to grow.
The first thing you have to learn when you go into the arts is to learn to cope with rejection. If you can't, you're dead.
The chief virtue that language can have is clearness, and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words.
If you want to be a writer, you must be in love with the process of writing, whether you achieve financial success or not.
The funny thing is that I write and I act a lot about being Jewish, but I don't really think about it as a regular person.
I always felt my writing could benefit from the attention of established writers. I knew my work could grow and be better.
Not writing is as important as writing - go out into the world and remember how interesting it, and the people in it, are.