Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I was a good pupil at primary school: in the second class I was writing with no spelling mistakes, and the third and fourth classes were done in a single year.
To converse with historians is to keep good company; many of them were excellent men, and those who were not, have taken care to appear such in their writings.
Each age tries to form its own conception of the past. Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time.
My advice to would-be young authors is to read a lot, write a lot, and not worry about creating a finished product. Keeping a journal is not a bad idea either.
I should write for the mere yearning and fondness I have for the beautiful, even if my night's labors should be burnt every morning and no eye shine upon them.
When I'm writing columns, it's - all I'm thinking about is jokes, joke, joke, joke, setup, punch line, joke, joke, joke. And I really don't care where it goes.
It usually takes me 20 to 90 minutes to write a song because once I start, I don't stop. I like when it's really organic, so I try to knock it out in one shot.
To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations - such is a pleasure beyond compare.
If I try to write a song, I will completely fail to write a song. But if I'm just holding my guitar and I just start humming, then I'll have a song in an hour.
I think about the sincerity of my writing. I try to be true, to pose questions. Shake people up a bit and make them look in a direction they wouldn't normally.
I loved to write; in my late teens I had a 'zine. But it wasn't until I went back to school, later on in my 20s, that I actually saw that I had writing talent.
Reviewing music or reviewing anything is a writing job. It's nice if you are experienced in the field you are writing about, but writing is what you are doing.
I was really interested in piano and sort of discovered that I was a writer when I was about 13 and started writing. And it was my secret thing and my passion.
The meaning ... of a writer will be found not just in what he intends to say, or what he does literally say, but in the effect of his writing on living beings.
It takes me six months to do a story. I think it out and then write it sentence by sentence - no first draft. I can't write five words but that I change seven.
The fan mail I get from kids are asking me questions which they do not ask their mothers and fathers. Because if they had, why write to me, a perfect stranger?
I'll make music, whether or not anyone is listening, for the rest of my life. It's a natural form of expression for me, the same way I draw and write and sing.
For a while, I felt a little self-impelled to write Lou Reed Kind of songs. I should have understood that a Lou Reed song was anything I wanted to write about.
The product itself should be it's own best salesman. Not the product alone, but the product plus a mental impression, and atmosphere, which you place around it
Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.
I'm writing a film. With our access to these powerful media, we're going to take over, because it's really disgusting what is put out there now to be consumed.
I think my voice worked out fine, but it was a lot of work for me. And I was very self-conscious about it. I was a bit self-conscious about writing lyrics too.
The thing you realize pretty quickly, though, is that being in front of an audience whose job it is to laugh is a big pressure if the writing is not hilarious.
Read the sacred writings of all the peoples on Earth. Through all of them runs, like a red thread, the hidden Science of attaining and maintaining wakefulness.
Writing is something you'll never learn in any university or at any school. It's something that is within you, and if it isn't there, nothing can put it there.
A publisher should always be on the receiving end. He should take an interest in almost any subject and remain anonymous, letting the author take center stage.
Naturally, people's image is of a performer, but the reality of it is the writing for me has always been the most important thing and the most rewarding thing.
Our minds simply don't function in some sort of narrative chronology. I think that one of the great gifts of writing fiction is being able to think about that.
I get absolutely ruthless in my own way about not doing anything else when I am trying to concentrate on writing a book. I have to stick to it and concentrate.
I had worked in this New York theatre company for my first eight or nine years out of college, acting and directing there, and I'd begun to write a little bit.
If I was writing about an academic or a more difficult person, I would use the Latinate vocabulary more, but I do think Anglo-saxon is the language of emotion.
There is no trick to it. If you like to write and want to write, you write, no matter where you are or what else you are doing or whether anyone pays any heed.
It's a very excruciating life facing that blank piece of paper every day and having to reach up somewhere into the clouds and bring something down out of them.
Sometimes I dream song ideas. I write a song in my dream, the melody and everything. But then sometimes I can't remember them. I think later on, I probably do.
The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes to realize that he is answerable.
Why the hell can't people just write nice happy stories about people having happy sex? That's what I want, and I bet a whole bunch of other people want it too.
I do not enjoy writing at all. If I can turn my back on an idea, out there in the dark, if I can avoid opening the door to it, I won't even reach for a pencil.
Adventure is just a romantic name for trouble. It sounds swell when you write about it, but it's hell when you meet it face to face in a dark and lonely place.
I've thought about writing, but it hasn't happened yet. It's like schoolwork - you start doing your revisions two nights before you're compelled to turn it in.
I think my biggest revelation was to write entirely from the heart, and to convey emotion, even when it meant forcing myself to feel uncomfortable in doing so.
Each day of not writing, of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his ability and softened his will to work so that, finally, he did no work at all.
It was a great thrill just to know Roy Orbison, so to play, sing, write hit songs with him and have him in The Traveling Wilburys was beyond my wildest dreams!
So I find the fascination, the love, the incredible skill and everything to do with acting, writing plays, and doing them, just darling. Lovely. I love actors.
Typos are very important to all written form. It gives the reader something to look for so they aren’t distracted by the total lack of content in your writing.
A young musician plays scales in his room and only bores his family. A beginning writer, on the other hand, sometimes has the misfortune of getting into print.
My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis.
If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.
But the explanations fell apart in her hands. Everything true was too hard to write--he was too much to lose. Everything she felt for him was too hot to touch.
I think one of the reasons I'm so thrilled with writing is because it is an act of reading for me at the same time, which is why my revisions are so sustained.
Designing the prints was very much like writing a story with characters, [inspired by] some of my my favorite icons of the time: Eva Perón and Josephine Baker.