Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I do write about thinkers. And that's what I love about reading. My favorite books, the ones that made me sit there for days, weeks, months, years, and pop back into my head - they make me think a lot.
The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time.
The reason why people think of programming as being hard is because you're writing down a general rule which is going to be used for lots of instances that a particular instance must process correctly.
Reading the word and learning how to write the word so one can later read it are preceded by learning how to write the world, that is having the experience of changing the world and touching the world.
I think it's really boring, from the point of view of the novelist, to write about yourself. Tedious. But that's very hard to explain to people who really don't believe in the possibility of invention.
Writing about why you write is a funny business, like scratching what doesn't itch. Impulses are mysterious, and explaining them must be done with mirrors, like certain cunning slight-of-hand routines.
Man, wow, there's so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even begin to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary inhibitions and grammatical fears.
Even now, I change my style and clothes from one day to the next, but during high school I blended in. I think a lot of people are that way. I guess that's why I can write about an array of characters.
For me, the work begins with a rough cut of the film. I can't do much with the script. I've tried to write music to a script prior to seeing the film, but I've found it turns out to be a waste of time.
I always write three or four projects at the same time. They're stories that I want to tell, and usually I dump them unfinished for the next one in order not to get too cornered and depressed about it.
George Smith shows how many of the prophet’s followers embraced plural marriage during a period when the LDS Church was emphatically denying the practice … [and he tells this in] a lucid writing style.
The best results come when people believe in and feel strongly about the music they are playing. Just as composers write for certain types of performers, performers are also looking for certain things.
Obviously this all gets tricky/complicated when your writing reveals so much of your private/intimate life, and the nature of writing on the Internet comes with a lot of focus on your "personal brand."
I'm willing to write a check for $10,000 if someone can bring to me what I fell is ruining thousands of lives, destroying lives everyday. And I know that you know it's a little thing called Chupacabra.
Whether I serve one or two terms in the Presidency, I will find myself at the end of that period at what might be called the awkward age-too old to begin a new career and too young to write my memoirs.
It's one of the most liberating things I experience in writing - letting yourself get rid of a gesture or character or plot point that always nagged, even if you couldn't admit to yourself that it did.
I spent many years trying to write a lot like Ben Folds or John Lennon or Rivers Cuomo. I think that's healthy when you're learning to write and seeing how chords fit together and how songs take shape.
I do have two data identities. I have my name, Bruce Sterling, which is my public name under which I write novels. I also have my other name, which is my legal name under which I own property and vote.
I wish I could be a better writer, but writing is so difficult. I get seduced by visual aesthetics. Because I just like making beautiful pictures, sometimes I wander away from making a clear statement.
That folk music led to learning to play, and making things up led to what turns out to be the most lucrative part of the music business - writing, because you get paid every time that song gets played.
The narrative songs were well-written, like an article in The New Yorker. They're nice and pat. They're more like I'm just showing I can do that when I write a song like that. It's not my true calling.
The best compliment I get every year is that a band will write me and say, 'We were just on tour, and we had people coming to our show saying they had never heard us before they heard us on your show.'
I am a writer who works from an outline. What I generally do when I build an outline is I find focal, important scenes, and I build them in my head and I don't write them yet, but I build towards them.
I live in the middle of nowhere and I'm an insomniac. I just make the time and I read and write really fast so that makes a lot possible for me. I wish I had an explanation for it. I'm grateful for it.
I just love writing. It's magical, it's somewhere else to go, it's somewhere much more dreadful, somewhere much more exciting. Somewhere I feel I belong, possibly more than in the so-called real world.
Analyze This is a good movie because Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal are really good. But without the material to put on the play, of course, they couldn't be good. For me, it starts with the writing.
Character is character and voice is voice, which translates nicely from writing novels to writing TV. But the process is different. You have a writer's room, people pitch you jokes and you collaborate.
I always say writing fiction isn't something you teach. It's something you do, and only experimentation - i.e. doing it, either badly or good sometimes - can help anybody get any better or worse at it.
Sometimes when you write something on the page, it can seem very funny, but when you act it out - and this happens to me a lot, actually - the melancholy of the situation becomes more front and center.
Most thoughts are only profiles of thoughts. They must be inverted and synthesized with their antipodes. Thus many philosophical writings become very interesting which would not have been so otherwise.
When things aren't working out, we have a tendency to say, 'Go do other things,' but you shouldn't do other things. You need to stay at your desk and continue to try to write. You need to insist on it.
The test of an author is not to be found merely in the number of his phrases that pass current in the corner of newspapers... but in the number of passages that have really taken root in younger minds.
Why I find Louis Brandeis so exciting and inspiring because he's teaching us - good legal writing is not a matter of taste, it's a matter of connection with fellow citizens and of democratic education.
I think the way I write is kind of naturally rhythmic. If there's anything of my own in my writing, I think that's my own thing. Like when I start a song, I almost hear the rhythm more than the melody.
I will write things, he was thinking. I will write something meaningful and wonderful someday. I can do that. And I'll dedicate it to you because you're the first person who ever made me think I could.
Forcing modern speakers of English to not - whoops, not to split an infinitive because it isn't done in Latin makes about as much sense as forcing modern residents of England to wear laurels and togas.
The recollection of how, when and where it all happened became vague as the lingering strains hung in the rafters of the studio. I wanted to shout back at it, Maybe I didn't write you, but I found you.
Writing is a very strenuous thing - it's like banging your head against a wall. At the end of the day, acting is better, just because nobody ever asked me if I wanted a Pellegrino in the writer's room.
Any musician with a slight level of self-awareness can be taught to write a 'good' song. A great song is completely original. It feels as if the performer is the only person who could bring it to life.
All this [Paul's writing] is nothing better than the jargon of a conjurer who picks up phrases he does not understand to confound the credulous people who come to have their fortune told. Age of Reason
I have never been able to read Agatha Christie - the pleasure is purely in the puzzle, and the reader is toyed with by someone who didn't decide herself who the killer was until the end of the writing.
I am just diving into life again. I just have nothing new to offer right now as an idea for a book. I feel like if I were to write something, I would probably repeat the same idea in a different story.
I don't know any artists or painters, like, "Oh that painting group." I want to write down this idea of a group of artists who treat it like a band. Like, "Who made the painting?" "All four of us did."
I write from my soul. This is the reason that critics don't hurt me, because it is me. If it was not me, if I was pretending to be someone else, then this could unbalance my world, but I know who I am.
I have difficulty putting words in peoples' mouths. The best dialogue is very, very thin dialogue; you let people improvise and then basically you record what they've improvised and then write it down.
You want the greatest trick for writing a novel? Here it is: imagine urgently whispering your story into one person's ear - and only one. This one visualization will clarify every word choice you make.
I like to write pop songs and the stuff I write is fairly poppy, so I thought maybe my lot in life was to write pop songs for people. It never felt right writing songs for other people to sing, though.
Quite often when I record a song, writing it and making a demo is the big thing and, after that, I think, how do I actually translate this into real life? A lot of the time I think I can't be bothered.
I think it may have been Tom Wolfe (if it wasn't, my apologies, Tom, and my apologies to whoever it was) who said in print once, 'David Carradine lives the life that Hunter Thompson only writes about.'
It's rare you get an idea from a dream. I can't really recall a story that ever worked out that way. I think in 35 years of writing, that I've ever had a dream that held up. They're much too dislocated