Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
In time I began to understand that it's when you start writing that you really find out what you don't know and need to know.
If I've been accused a number of times of writing plays where the endings are ambivalent, indeed, that's the way I find life.
This is what I love about novels - both reading them and writing them. They jump into the abyss to be with you where you are.
One function of the imagination in autobiographical writing is to allow the writer to try out different versions of the self.
Make no mistake, those who write long books have nothing to say. Of course those who write short books have even less to say.
I regard writing not as an investigation of character but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed.
I try to write 'and it's all very funny' after each scene description so that the reader can imagine the movie in their head.
In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book.
To write drama is to leave a can of Coke by the side of the road. Then, sit on that can of Coke. Where's the can of Coke now?
It’s an important time to be writing about the connections we share with our fellow creatures. It’s a great time to be alive.
Any time I sit down and write music, the first part of that is always centering myself and thinking about who I currently am.
I'd just like to see - in writing about baseball - more energy and better craft, minus statistical bludgeoning and invective.
U2 is sort of song writing by accident really. We don't really know what we're doing and when we do, it doesn't seem to help.
There's a ton of good art and music and writing out there offline among a ton of trash, and the same goes with what's online.
When you write you have a certain vision of how it could be and it's great to be able to see it all the way to the goal line.
That's why writers write—to say things loudly with ink. To give feet to thoughts; to make quiet, still feelings loudly heard.
I've done too many stupid things for there not to be movies made about me when I'm dead, so I might as well write the script.
I think if you write music for soundtracks then sometimes you do something that you could never do if the film did not exist.
Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that.
If a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances.
I can still boss people around. I can still write. I can still read. I can still eat, and I can still have very strong views.
I enjoy research; in fact research is so engaging that it would be easy to go on for years, and never write the novel at all.
Anxiety is not only an inevitable part of the writing process but a necessary part. If you’re not scared, you’re not writing.
The two things I enjoy the most about writing are the first page of a book and the last. What's in between is very hard work.
I don’t write this letter to put bitterness into your heart, but to pluck it out of mine. For my own sake I must forgive you.
He that uses many words for explaining any subject, doth, like the cuttlefish, hide himself for the most part in his own ink.
While an author is yet living, we estimate his powers by his worst performance; and when he is dead, we rate him by his best.
I spent a long time working in the movies to figure out that kind of acting and also how to write and produce for the screen.
If I have an idea, I write it down, although I usually carry a little dictation machine with me because I'm too lazy to write
I always loved animals. And when I was ten, I decided I had to go to Africa and live with animals and write books about them.
I don’t think any man writing can worry about what the act of writing costs him, even though at times he is very aware of it.
Writing is a performance art for me. They're very closely aligned, writing and performing. But I'm a writer, not a performer.
When I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and it is all one.
In the end, for me, the sole single goal is to write the best novel that I can. Whether or not it gets made or gets purchased.
I wanted to write about Afghanistan before the Soviet war because that is largely a forgotten period in modern Afghan history.
There is no remedy so easy as books, which if they do not give cheerfulness, at least restore quiet to the most troubled mind.
Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.
I think the deeper you go into questions, the deeper or more interesting the questions get. And I think that's the job of art.
Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?
If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.
There are, first of all, two kinds of authors: those who write for the subject's sake, and those who write for writing's sake.
It doesn't matter if your lead character is good or bad. He just has to be interesting, and he has to be good at what he does.
There are two moments worthwhile in writing, the one when you start and the other when you throw it in the waste-paper basket.
A man who writes well writes not as others write, but as he himself writes; it is often in speaking badly that he speaks well.
The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It's quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.
If there is one 'scientific' discovery I am proud of, it is the discovery of the habit of writing without publication in mind.
Directing my own writing, I see that I talk way too much, and everything can happen much sooner, with much less said about it.
There's no idea in the world that is not contained by black life. I could write forever about the black experience in America.
I usually write songs when I'm in a car by myself and it's usually dangerous because I'm writin' and drivin' at the same time.
CEMETERY, n. An isolated suburban spot where mourners match lies, poets write at a target and stone-cutters spell for a wager.