Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Once I start writing, I am a huge reviser. To me writing is revising. I probably turn over every sentence that I write, to see if I have the rhythm right. That's why my first drafts take a really long time.
I think I have a hard time expressing myself in my relationships. I use songs to tell people how I'm feeling. If I can't say 'I love you,' I'll write a song about it and hope that the person figures it out.
Once I had all the facts in, I found I didn't have the immoral courage to pull the caper. So I wrote it as a story. As a teenager, I didn't have any skills for writing as such, so it came out in 1500 words.
Making people believe the unbelievable is no trick; it's work... Belief and reader absorption come in the details: An overturned tricycle in the gutter of an abandoned neighborhood can stand for everything.
As an actress, you're living something through the duration of the play and its geography. I've always seen writing the same way. It's like somehow I'm moving through the terrain of the book as a performer.
I'm not ritualistic about writing. I try to write as often as possible, which means that I have to be able to write in all kinds of situations, whether it's at home on my couch, out at a cafe, or traveling.
The habits of craft, developed day in and day out over a working lifetime, create moments of astonishment, sublime and magical effects, precisely because the writer is not thinking overtly about making art.
Breathtakingly real and utterly compelling, Immoral dishes up page-turning psychological suspense while treating us lucky readers to some of the most literate and stylish writing you'll find anywhere today.
I was the kind of person who knew what he wanted to do; I wanted to write, I wanted not to be in school, and I felt that university would just be spending another four years of my life before I could write.
When I write a scientific treatise, I might reach 100 people. When the 'National Geographic' covers a project, it communicates about plants and fish and underwater technology to more than 10 million people.
Writing non-free software is not an ethically legitimate activity, so if people who do this run into trouble, that's good! All businesses based on non-free software ought to fail, and the sooner the better.
Back then, when I had that original idea to write about the seventeenth century, the whole thing was set in 1666. I was thinking of Margaret near the end of her life, and that was the voice I heard for her.
Here's my answer to the very real existential crisis that grips me midway through everything I've ever tried to do: I think stories help us fight the nihilistic urges that constantly threaten to consume us.
I like vocal word stuff. But I don't always write with an instrument, I usually write a capella. It's more like drawing in the air with your fingers. It's closest to the choreography of a bee. You're freer.
You can have good writing, but a great actor will make it feel and sound like great writing. You can have great writing, and mediocre actors will make it feel mediocre. Without the actors, you have nothing.
I think if you can write a play, or produce a play, the first step toward success [is] if people don't want to kill themselves in the lobby. Now there must be four or five other steps, but that's the first.
People try to be more edgy, or write about that first explosive meeting between two people in a club, but not so much the long-term issues; I don't know how to write a song about teenage heartbreak anymore.
I'd sell one of my songs for any car commercial in the world that paid enough money. But to stay in the Top Ten for weeks on end when I'm in my forties by letting Glen Ballard write songs for me? F**k that.
I have both experienced and witnessed a great deal of suffering in my life, and that has informed my art. I'm here today, because I'm a fighter. I didn't survive my life to ask permission to write my books.
But I account the use that a man should seek of the publishing of his own writings before his death, to be but an untimely anticipation of that which is proper to follow a man, and not to go along with him.
I don't know if any single book made me want to write. C.S. Lewis was the first writer to make me aware that somebody was writing the book I was reading - these wonderful parenthetical asides to the reader.
This book blew me away. Kelly Parra writes with the keen eye of an artist. Graffiti Girl is warm, gutsy, and true-to-life - an unflinching, honest portrayal of young adults. A seamless and impressive debut.
Show enough backstory to allow the reader to glean and make assumptions about what remains behind the curtain of time, yet continues to influence the character’s worldview, attitudes, decisions, and actions.
If, while observing the boundless universe, the writer is able to scrutinise his own self as well as others, the resulting incisiveness of his observations will far surpass objective descriptions of reality.
I can't write or read music. I am self-taught and never learned formally. It can be a curse sometimes but I think it's more difficult for those who need the music to read from than for those who play by ear.
Ach, Tchekov! Why are you dead? Why can’t I talk to you in a big darkish room at late evening—where the light is green from the waving trees outside? I’d like to write a series of Heavens: that would be one.
He felt himself in suspension between the two worlds, the warm, neat civilization behind his back, the cool, dark mystery outside. We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
What do I do when writing isn't going well? Well, I don't write - which is symptom, cure, and cause. And then sometimes I just tell myself, as I'm writing, "I'll fix it later." And sometimes it's true, I do.
My memory is certainly in my hands. I can remember things only if I have a pencil and I can write with it and I can play with it. ... I think your hand concentrates for you. I don't know why it should be so.
My failure, during the first five or six years of my art training, to get set in the right direction, and the disappointment which it caused me, drove me the more persistently into writing as an alternative.
In our dreams (writes Coleridge) images represent the sensations we think they cause; we do not feel horror because we are threatened by a sphinx; we dream of a sphinx in order to explain the horror we feel.
Write great songs that sound amazing if sung and played on the piano or acoustic guitar. Always encourage sing-alongs! Be prolific! Say "Yes" to new collaborations because you never know where it could lead.
Food is fun to write about because everybody has an opinion. Food is also fun to write about because it's a challenge. There are only so many ways to describe a plate of gnudi without resorting to "pillowy."
The awkwardness and embarrassment which all feel on beginning to write, when they themselves are the theme, ought to serve as a hint to author's that self is a subject they ought very rarely to descant upon.
I only tweet about food and silly things, but it's really fascinating because I get a lot of response on Twitter, and I'm always looking at the type of people who write me on there, and it is such a variety.
A lot of times people do spiritual practice just for themselves. I try to turn that a little bit. I try to make spiritual practice more a part of the community. I write about infusing people with compassion.
I like to go in the corner, in the quiet, 'cause I got to hear my thoughts. If I hear the beat for, like, five seconds, I basically got the tempo, and I don't need to hear it no more. I just focus and write.
Rohini Mohan read. While she did, I sketched her. She writes with such beauty and violence, and it seemed like the best way to listen was to really watch her, in the way that only drawing someone lets me do.
All we really have when we pretend to write about the future is the moment in which we are writing. That's why every imagined future obsoletes like an ice cream melting on the way back from the corner store.
I have no system of writing. It's chaos. I could be upside down on my bedroom floor; I'll be scribbling on a pad that I'll then lose. I'll be on the toilet with my laptop on, sitting in the pub with my iPad.
I always loved singing and writing poetry. I always loved music, and I’ve loved writing my whole life. When I put them together it was probably in my early 20s, where I put words to music for the first time.
The assertion of failure coming from such persons does not mean that Mr. Mill failed to promote the practical success of those objects the advocacy of which forms the chief feature of his political writings.
I don't take notes; I don't outline, I don't do anything like that. I just flail away at the goddamn thing. I'm a salami writer. I try to write good salami, but salami is salami. You can't sell it as caviar.
I wish I could Buy Time - just write a cheque, and a few days later a brown cardboard box would arrive at the door containing three months (along with an extra bonus sunny weekend for being a good customer).
I mean, what would I be doing if I couldn't write? But that fortunately hasn't proved to be the case and I can read any day. I still read a lot, and I can write any day, but much more slowly and fewer words.
When you're writing something new, writing something that's your own, basically you have nothing else to do except either invent a trick, use someone else's trick, or have no trick and get a bad performance.
The writer works on the inside and the critic works on the outside. I don't know what it looks like on the outside, sometimes. It's not that I'm not interested-it's not where I live. I live inside the story.
In order to be able to write well upon a subject, one must have ceased to be interested in it; the thought which is to be soberlyexpressed must already be entirely past and no longer be one's actual concern.
A writer stops writing the moment he or she puts the last full stop to their text, and at that point the book is in limbo and doesn't come to life until the reader picks it up and the reader flips the pages.
I always wrote. I've written stories since I was 9. We didn't have a computer at home, but my aunt Magda had one. Whenever I'd go to her place, I was in the basement working on her computer, writing stories.