Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
For me, the monologue was the favorite thing I had done in radio. It was based on writing, but in the end it was radio, it was standing up and leaning forward into the dark and talking, letting words come out of you.
From Caesar's legions to the Napoleonic wars. From the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution to the defeat of nazism. We have helped to write European history, and Europe has helped write ours.
Delia Sherman once told me that you never learn to write a story. You only learn to write the story you are currently writing. You have to learn how to write the next story all over again. And she's absolutely right.
The inspiration for my novels comes from the depths of a creative well, based on asking myself questions over and over. I try to write something different each time I sit down to write; I try to surprise the readers.
Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing.... For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.
The world we live in has been and is being increasingly politicized so that our daily experience is more and more a matter of public policy. A lot of fiction comes out of a child's feeling of, "Hey, that's not fair."
I agree with Balzac and 19th-century writers, black and white, who say, 'I write for money.' Yes, I think everybody should be paid handsomely; I insist on it, and I pay people who work for me, or with me, handsomely.
I'm going to write a book, continue acting, continue motivational speaking and just share with people who I am and what I've learned in my second chance of life and pass it on to people in their first chance of life.
I think it's always been very natural. I don't write a diary - it's reflections and thoughts and feelings that come to me at a certain point, and when I go back to my old records, they capture the time I was in then.
Rewriting is when writing really gets to be fun. . . . In baseball you only get three swings and you're out. In rewriting, you get almost as many swings as you want and you know, sooner or later, you'll hit the ball.
When the target audience is American teenage kids, you can have problems. My generation prized really fine acting and writing. Sometimes you have to go back to the basic principles which underpin great visual comedy.
Poets are being pursued by the philosophers today, out of the poverty of philosophy. God damn it, you might think a man had no business to be writing, to be a poet unless some philosophic stinker gave him permission.
I'd always loved the theater, and I began by writing plays. I work in the theater a lot in the UK, and I've worked in the theater out here quite a bit. Everything else - the films - followed as a consequence of that.
I had always been interested in screenwriting, ever since I could write things down as a child. Obviously, I started as an actor, professionally, but screenwriting was always something that I had a great interest in.
I've been writing and collecting songs on the ukulele for at least 10 years, so it was time to clear them out of the apartment building and make room for some new occupants.I need to make room for the bassoon record.
If you write for the New Yorker, you always get people critiquing your grammar, you can count on it. So, because a lot of New Yorker readers are kind of, you know, amateur grammarians and so you do get a lot of that.
Writing about a place is, of course, one good way of feeling close to it, feeling you have made something out of your interaction with that place. It's like a marker of your own experience, of that time in your life.
Writing is a perpetual choice between a thousand expressions, none of which satisfies me, none of which, above all, satisfies me without the others. Yet I ought to know that only music permits a succession of chords.
I write, and when see a movie in which it's supernatural, some other worlds, or some other aspect to our world that we're not aware of, and [they] don't explain what the rules are, that kind of stuff drives me crazy.
I've been transformed by stories, and I think that storytelling is definitely sacred. I take it very seriously because my life has been changed, whether it was a movie, a play, a piece of writing, poetry, a painting.
A lot of people can figure out the social media aspect of it, or the merchandising aspect, or whatever and get enough momentum to start a career. To sustain it, you have to keep writing and you have to keep creating.
In a lot of writing or intellectual discourse we're starting to use that model: "Oh, this is where it comes from!" I would like to concentrate on work which is more resistant to that procedure, as I think fiction is.
Technology has helped me with the writing and recording processes, and it's a great way to reach out to fans of my music, ... Dell's combining all these different technologies and making it really easy to enjoy them.
Our eyes are not viewers, they're also projectors that are running a second story over the picture that we see in front of us all the time. Fear is writing that script, and the working title is 'I'll never be enough'
I didn't intend to be writing - the writer's life. I was just writing what came to me at the time, but it is a map of how this writer had to break many barriers to find, not a room of her own, but a house of her own.
Among the letters my readers write me, there is a certain category which is continuously growing, and which I see as a symptom of the increasing intellectualization of the relationship between readers and literature.
When I was 21, I got into a motorcycle accident while traveling in Europe and I had to lie around a lot in the aftermath, which was really the first time in my life that I became really focused and inspired to write.
Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.
The deepest satisfaction of writing is precisely that it opens up new spaces within us of which we were not aware before we started to write. To write is to embark on a journey whose final destination we do not know.
I never could figure out how those people like Bukowski could be both carousers and writers at the same time, because to me writing takes as much destructive energy as it takes to be a really good professional drunk.
The audience will teach you how to act and the audience will teach you how to write and to direct. The classroom will teach you how to obey, and obedience in the theatre will get you nowhere. It’s a soothing falsity.
Find what gave you emotion; what the action was that gave you excitement. Then write it down making it clear so that the reader can see it too. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
When I began to write fiction that I knew would be published as science fiction, [and] part of what I brought to it was the critical knowledge that science fiction was always about the period in which it was written.
Set goals that are well balanced-not too many nor too few, and not too high nor too low. Write down your attainable goals and work on them according to their importance. Pray for divine guidance in your goal setting.
Normal, day-to-day things inspire you to write. I try to travel and chill, and go out and enjoy the outdoors. That makes you see the real world. Not just in the studio or at concerts. I live it up as normal as I can.
I find that it is useless to worry about things I can't control and I can't control how many people come out tonight. All I can do is focus on writing the best songs I can write and performing the best I can perform.
Writing is always a way, for me, of coming to some sort of understanding that I can't reach otherwise.It forces you to think. It forces you to work the thing through. Nothing comes to us out of the blue, very easily.
Deleting 200 spams a day is a drag. And I was checking my email constantly, rather than getting on with my real work, which is reading and writing. Email was becoming a distraction, a burden rather than a liberation.
If you just write the kinds of stories you think others will want to read, you'll be competing with cartoonists who are far more enthusiastic for that kind of comic than you are, and they'll kick your ass every time.
I started writing a novel from the monster's point of view. It has its own difficulties but, I'm ashamed to say, it's much easier writing from a psychopath's point of view than from that of their empathetic opposite.
Honestly, I don't try to guess at what most people want. I don't think I'd guess right, and I just think that that's not a good recipe for storytelling. I try to write what I like, what I think my friends would like.
The rumors of Frank Sinatras violence and his ties to organized crime were such that journalists joked in print about me ending up in concrete boots and sleeping with the fishes if I proceeded to write his biography.
You're there right through the match, thinking all the time, making it up as you go along. We don't have anybody write our scripts. You're basically presenting to the people watching at home off the top of your head.
Ultimately one has to pity these poor souls who know every secret about writing, directing, designing, producing, and acting but are stuck in those miserable day jobs writing reviews. Will somebody help them, please?
I don't have any delusions. I'm not a novelist - I'm a comedian who writes. I love doing the stand-up and the touring and the albums and all that, but it's pretty amazing to go into a library and see your book there.
I can go write an absolutely saccharine pop record with a really catchy lyric for another artist that could become a hit without meaning anything to me, but that's more the science laboratory, that's the other thing.
From my years of teaching creative writing, I know that new writers take the setting for granted, as simply a place to set the action, but setting is a vital element in fiction writing and deserves serious treatment.
If you're meant to do something like writing and you end up going into banking or finance, your going to be miserable. You're trying to fit something into a square peg and a round hole. It's just never going to work.
Some words have to be explicitly uttered, Lenore. Only by actually uttering certain words does one really DO what one SAYS. 'Love' is one of those words, performative words. Some words can literally make things real.
Writing a book is as different from digital curation as night and day. Digital curation is a series of split-second decisions: good/no good. It can even be done algorithmically. Writing is process-intensive activity.