Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I guess that my opinion of writing about real people is informed by defenses of Joyce Maynard's memoir, that the experiences were a part of my life as well, and that I have the right to write about my life.
I began writing at the age of 5, but there was a dark period between the ages of 8 and 16 when I didn't write. I started again at 16. And have no idea why, but it was suddenly the only thing I wanted to do.
I taught myself to play guitar and sing. I ended up writing a lot of music and had a band and was playing in bars and pubs all around Sydney, going on tour. I played with some pretty big bands in Australia.
I've been blogging since February of 2001. When I started blogging, it was a dinosaur blog. It was me and a handful of tyrannosaurs. We'd be writing blog entries like, 'The tyrannosaurus is getting grumpy.'
No matter how many red Xs we write on our hands to end slavery, as long as these same hands are clicking on pornographic websites and scrolling through sexual pictures and videos, we are frauds to the core.
Joseph [Millar] is much more disciplined than I am. He's up every morning meditating, then he writes, and he reads throughout the day. He probably reads ten books to my two and writes twice as much as I do.
Most books about writing are filled with bullshit. Fiction writers, present company included, don’t understand very much about what they do—not why it works when it’s good, not why it doesn’t when it’s bad.
I know I've done good work. I've been very serious about my writing, and I've done the best that I could. But I don't feel that I've done more than I should have. In fact, I've done less than I should have.
My greatest affliction... is perhaps the major theme of my writings, the affliction of loneliness that follows me like a shadow, a very ponderous shadow too heavy to drag after me all of my days and nights.
The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite. Without this, it is impossible to accumulate, within the allotted span, enough experience of eating to have anything worth setting down.
Yet, I had nothing else to tell; unless, indeed, I were to confess (which might be of less moment still), that no one can ever believe this Narrative, in the reading, more than I believed it in the writing.
Usually I try to be there by six. Everything has been taken off the walls so that there's nothing to arrest my sight. On the bed I have Roget's Thesaurus, a dictionary, a Bible, and a deck of playing cards.
The writing of poetry is a chancy business, it's currency solitude and loss, its tools coffee and too much wine, its hours midnight, dawn, and dusk, and unlike other trade the hours asleep are not time off.
Poetry, at least the kind I write, is written out of immediate need; it is written out of pain, joy, and experience too great to be borne until it is ordered into words. And then it is written to be shared.
The pen is an instrument of discovery rather than just a recording implement. If you write a letter of resignation or something with an agenda, you're simply using a pen to record what you have thought out.
A lot of artists use memories. A lot of prose writers, a lot of poets, a lot of songwriters, refer back to something. Generally it's all you've got, unless you're brilliant and can write totally in the now.
The only equivalent plunge from genius I could think of was Ernest Hemmingway's tragic loss of ability to write. Hemmingway got up one morning and shot himself. Nicklaus got up the next morning and shot 66.
I began to write what I called 'rhythms' ie unrhymed pieces with no formal metrical scheme where the rhythm was created by a kind if inner chant... Later I was told I was writing 'free verse' or Vers libre.
If you are pointing out one of the things a story is about, then you are very probably right; if you are pointing out the only thing a story is about you are very probably wrong - even if you're the author.
One day I was speeding along at the typewriter, and my daughter - who was a child at the time - asked me, "Daddy, why are you writing so fast?" And I replied, "Because I want to see how the story turns out!
I'd love to be able to write an in-depth piece of what causes men like [Richard] Nixon and [H.R.]Haldeman and [John] Ehrlichman and all the rest of them not only to run, but what causes us to vote for them.
There are no rules that say lawyers cannot write or speak from their heart. Passion has never been formally outlawed, although it is a little-known experience among most lawyers and nearly all academicians.
The aftermath of the war is what inspired us to write many of our plays. The whole reason for our writing Inherit the Wind was that we were appalled at the blacklisting. We were appalled at thought control.
But really, it was reading that led me to writing. And in particular, reading the American classics like Twain who taught me at an early age that ordinary lives of ordinary people can be made into high art.
There will come a day when you will be stronger and you will forget that person that just broke your heart. It's very hard to do that, but that's why you surround yourself with good people. Or write a song!
I think that by the time I start writing the third book, of course, I will be President Of The United States, and that also will have something to do with it. I'll probably have to acknowledge that somehow.
The great thing about writing about the ancient Spartans or Athenians is that so much knowledge is no longer extant that no one, except maybe a Cambridge or Oxford don, can call you out and prove you wrong.
My own education has been entirely controversial: that is why I know what I am writing about; and appear eccentric to dogmatically educated Old School Ties whose heads are stuffed with obsolete shibboleths.
Rod Clark has one of the most unique voices I have ever encountered. I still quote some of his political insights years later. To have him write political science fiction is both appropriate and intriguing.
Success is a finished book, a stack of pages each of which is filled with words. If you reach that point, you have won a victory over yourself no less impressive than sailing single-handed around the world.
Anything can happen in SF. And the fact that nothing ever does happen in SF is only due to the poverty of our imaginations, we who write it or edit it or read it. But SF can in principle deal with anything.
In nearly everything I write, I am like a ventriloquist, throwing my voice into my characters, animating them by the slightest twitch as I register my anxieties and alarms. This is true even in my comedies.
Cooking is the best way to unwind at the end of a long writing day. There's something mindless and hands-on about cooking, which makes it feel like the very opposite of writing, which is heady but inactive.
When I became a feminist, when the movement started in the late sixties, I started writing because I had something urgent to say. My first novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, is the product of that urgency.
I have more freedom when I write fiction, but my memoirs have had a much stronger impact on my readers. Somehow the 'message,' even if I am not even aware that there is one, is conveyed better in this form.
Poets, on the face of it, have either got to be easier or to write their own notes; readers have either got to take more trouble over reading or cease to regard notes as pretentious and a sign of bad poetry
When it was suggested that I write a memoir I said, 'I'm not old enough. I'm not distinguished enough.' But I went home and sat down to write, and the material for the book just came flooding into my hands.
There are five things to write songs about: I'm leaving you. You're leaving me. I want you. You don't want me. I believe in something. Five subjects, and 12 notes. For all that, we musicians do pretty well.
Does he write to you? Never a line. Does he send you a message? Never a word. It is because he loves you, poor fool, and is trying to forget you, since you are not free to listen to him or to belong to him.
I made a big conscious decision in my life when I was writing all these big action movies and doing different kind of fare but very proud of it, I was finding myself less and less passionate about doing it.
When seriously explored, the short story seems to me the most difficult and disciplining form of prose writing extant. Whatever control and technique I may have I owe entirely to my training in this medium.
Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer.
I started writing it the day after Sept. 11. I was living in New York City. We didnt have any phone service and we didnt have any mail. Like a lot of writers do, I started to write in a voice that I missed.
The first and perhaps the most important requirement for a successful writing performance - and writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig - is to understand the nature of the occasion.
The words come. Usually, it's a long time before they come. And then when they start to come, it doesn't take so long for it to be finished. It takes a long time to begin. And then it sort of gets finished.
I find research fascinating and always conduct some before I begin writing, and then fill in the rest as needed. I read stacks of books and also had the opportunity to travel to England to do more research.
I have an open mind - - I read, I study, I study your work and the work of other people with less talent. But that is not what I do in my writing and teaching. Still the love for the text we have in common.
A mission that comes from the heart to promote these things and to encourage composers to write, then of course they should do it. And there are more than a few pianists these days who do this, fortunately.
We know what we are doing by now.We seem to make an album every 18 months or so and I think every band should do that. We're not writing "Sgt. Pepper" every time; we are writing straight ahead rock n' roll.
Also, if nothing else, writing this book has really changed the way I experience bookstores. I have a whole different appreciation for the amount of work packed into even the slimmest volume on the shelves.