Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Do you ever do that thing where you lie in bed and you can't sleep so you end up writing out recent conversation you've had? So they look like a play?' Well you should. It's fun. I keep them. Look through them, sometimes.
No, women like you don't write. They carve onion sculptures and potato statues. They sit in dark corners and braid their hair in new shapes and twists in order to control the stiffness, the unruliness, the rebelliousness.
I received a grant from The Ford Foundation to write a book for kids about urban perception, or how people experience cities, but I kept putting off writing it. Instead I started to write what became The Phantom Tollbooth
I am often asked why I started to write poetry. The answer is that my motivation sprang from a visceral need to creatively articulate the experiences of the black youth of my generation, coming of age in a racist society.
I'm incredibly restless. I read a lot of poetry. I also find myself reading the first 20 pages of everything, looking for something. And you know what? I'm usually looking for the book I'm writing. And it's not out there!
I believe that one of the most sound ideas in dramatic writing is that in order to create the universal, you must pay very great attention to the specific. Universality, I think, emerges from truthful identity of what is.
Once upon a time, people identified the god Neptune as the source of storms at sea. Today we call these storms hurricanes.... The only people who still call hurricanes acts of God are the people who write insurance forms.
I had a problem with cops pulling me over all the time for speeding. When I was doing Hill Street Blues, the cops said how much they loved the show as they were writing me up; meanwhile my insurance went through the roof.
I don't feel any kind of a responsibility (other than to myself) to write "weighty" lyrics. In fact I sometimes wish I could learn to write in a simpler form, to be more direct and I'm going to be experimenting with this.
I think there's something strange about writing a script I've written many, many scripts - dozens and dozens of scripts - and every time I start one, I think to myself: 'why in the world do I think I know how to do this?'
Exercise II. Write a diary, imagining that you are trying to make an old person jealous. I have written an example to get you started: Dear Diary, I spent the morning admiring my skin elasticity. God alive, I feel supple.
What you write should entertain you and serve you first. Don't worry about maintaining anything beyond your own attention. Focus on exorcising your demons in the work. If you can do that, then you'll succeed in the world.
I write anywhere. I'm always banging around on the dashboard. Whatever I'm doing. I can make music out of anything. Whenever a song hits me, I'll pick some sort of melody or rhythm out on it, and kind of enhance the song.
Writing's funny, it's like walking down a hall in the dark looking for the light switch, and suddenly you find it, flip it on, and then you discover the hallway you passed through is papered with the novel you've written.
I'm pretty lenient with myself about time - if I feel like taking photographs of small things inside ice cubes or making animal collages, I just do it. When I want to write, I write. It's all part of the same thing for me.
When I left politics in the early Eighties and started writing and recording, my idea was that I could have an influence further down into other generations. That Natives could come into the culture through arts and music.
I work as an artist, and I think the audience of one, which is the self, and I have to satisfy myself as an artist. So I always say that I write for the same people that Picasso painted for. I think he painted for himself.
As a director who does not like to write, I am always looking for scripts that I can contribute to through directing. I don't want to do the same thing that the writer is doing; I want to add an angle or highlight a theme.
A party who bequeaths a note bequeaths the claim and not merely the material on which the writing appears. This is proved by a sale, for when a note is sold, the debt by which it is evidenced is also considered to be sold.
Anyone who knows me knows I can be a control freak with things I love doing. I love doing fashion and I love writing, so everything I've done I'm really involved with, so it's not really work to me because I'm enjoying it.
Like everyone else, I am going to die. But the words - the words live on for as long as there are readers to see them, audiences to hear them. It is immortality by proxy. It is not really a bad deal, all things considered.
I write what needs to be written the way that seems genuinely right. If what comes out of it are stories, then it is my vocation to believe in them and in the fact that they'll interest people and maybe affect their lives.
I advised Chambers, and would advise every young man beginning to compose, to do it as fast as he can, to get a habit of having his mind to start promptly; it is so much more difficult to improve in speed than in accuracy.
There's a little book I'm thinking of writing - "Swan Song" is what I shall call it. The song of the dying. And my book will be incense burnt at the deathbed of this society, damned with the damnation of its own impotence.
A lot of writers ... sit in a log cabin by the lake and put their feet up by the fire in the silence and write. If you can have that that's all very well, but the true writer will learn to write anywhere -- even in prison.
Writing in other voices is almost Japanese in the sense that theres a certain formality there which allows me to sidestep the embarrassment of directly expressing to complete strangers the most intimate details of my life.
Writing a book is a brilliant thing because once you've finished it, you've done it, and there's the potential for it to go on earning you a living without you doing any more work on it. It's absolutely ideal for an idler.
One of the things he liked about playwriting as to any other kind of writing is that a playwright is a w-r-i-g-h-t, not a w-r-i-t-e; in other words, that a playwright is more of a craftsman than an artist of the big novel.
Sometimes I would write while inspired and sometimes I would write through sheer force of will, and in revision the writing that I thought was "dead" very frequently turned out to be better because it was more free of ego.
I am very active on Twitter and one thing that keeps popping up is "How do I balance having a kid and writing?" And I know it should not be as aggravating, but I know no one ever asks a male writer that. Or, any male that.
To write three series a year you only need to commit to writing 10 pages per day, or editing 50 pages of text per day. Plus, writing is my job, and I need to write to eat, so I'm highly motivated to get up and get to work!
I don't want to be anxious on my day-to-day life. I want to try to imagine a future I'd like to live in and then write books and do things that, in my own small way, make it more likely that that future will come to exist.
In a practical sense, pain kept me from sitting down as much, so that sometimes I would have to stand to write. Not that I would necessarily have gotten anywhere anyway. But it definitely set me back to be in so much pain.
I think segregation is bad, I think it's wrong, it's immoral. I'd fight against it with every breath in my body, but you don't need to sit next to a white person to learn how to read and write. The NAACP needs to say that.
As for me, this is my story: I worked and was tortured. You know what it means to compose? No, thank God, you do not! I believe you have never written to order, by the yard, and have never experienced that hellish torture.
We should write an elegy for every day that has slipped through our lives unnoticed and unappreciated. Better still, we should write a song of thanksgiving for all the days that remain-now that we know how to cherish them.
In Britain, because I live here, I can also run into problems of envy and competition. But all this is just in a day's work for a writer. You can't put stuff out there without someone calling you a complete fool. Oh, well.
I would never write realistic prose. I don't like people who try to write in a poetic style, but in the course of their book abandon it for realism, and weave back and forth like drunkards between the surreal and the real.
I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.
It's a privilege to be able to have an idea and go into a group of executives and say, "I really want to write about this, and I really am interested in this," and for them to say, "Yes," and give you the money to make it.
Everybody has they're own audience you know what I'm saying. I write rhymes and make music for the people that I fell wanna hear my music. They write rhymes and make music for the people they feel wanna hear they're music.
The mind can proceed only so far upon what it knows and can prove. There comes a point where the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge, but can never prove how it got there. All great discoveries have involved such a leap
Now, after I have published a few books, I can clearly feel the impact of censorship when I write. For example, I'll think of a sentence, and then realize that it will for sure get deleted. Then I won't even write it down.
It is a sad paradox that when male authors impersonate women ... they are said to be dealing with 'cosmic, major concerns' - but when we impersonate ourselves we are said to be writing 'women's fiction' or 'women's poetry.
The productions of a great genius, with many lapses and inadvertences, are infinitely preferable to the works of an inferior kind of author which are scrupulously exact, and conformable to all the rules of correct writing.
Most good writing is clear, vigorous, honest, alive, sensuous, appropriate, unsentimental, rhythmic, without pretension, fresh, metaphorical, evocative in sound, economical, authoritative, surprising, memorable, and light.
So much of a novelist's writing, as I have said, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on the paper. We remember details of our story, we do not invent them.
What I miss today more than anything else - I don't go to church as much anymore - but that old-time religion, that old singing, that old praying which I love so much. That is the great strength of my being, of my writing.
I wish that I could write. I think that's a wonderful outlet for an artist. You are ultimately in control. Your fate is not determined by outside influences. You can write wherever you are. I don't think I have the talent.
If I had more time, I could've utilized the stage more and turned it into my own but since I used all my energy writing and producing songs, my mind was blank when it came to my performances. That's what I regret the most.