Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm someone that examines culture and tries to break down why things are the way that they are whether its hip-hop music, sex, race, or consumerism. I try to examine it and scrutinize it to the point where I can write a song.
I also wear a hat or a very tightly pulled head tie when I write. I suppose I hope by doing that I will keep my brains from seeping out of my scalp and running in great gray blobs down my neck, into my ears, and over my face.
You're always hoping you can attract a bigger audience, but at the same time, I'd hate to give up what I write. If I could write Chick Lit or something like that and make money off it, that'd be great. But I just can't do it.
I became really aware that when you're making a movie, you're making it three times. You're making it when you're writing it. You're making it when you're shooting it. And then you're remaking it again when you're editing it.
I don't need to write comics for a living. I have movies and TV for that. I write comics for one reason and one reason only: I love comics. I love the form, the structure, the storytelling process, I love everything about it.
I do find it therapeutic, writing about stuff that was frightening and painful as a child, and managing to see it from an adult's point of view. To get it out of the closet onto paper, metaphorically speaking, is therapeutic.
My big dream back then was to buy an IBM Selectric. I still have that dream. I really ought to buy a word-processor. Half the cabbies at Rocky own computers. They tell me they can write failed novels ten times faster on a PC.
It is sublime to think and say of another, I need never meet, or speak, or write to him: we need not reinforce ourselves, or send tokens of remembrance; I rely on him as on myself: if he did thus and thus, I know it was right.
I think one of the things about writing in the studio is that the song hasn't matured, if you like, so quite often the vocals are early attempts. Whereas once you've taken it out on the road a bit, you learn more about a song.
But maybe it's up the hills or under the leaves or in a ditch somewhere. Maybe it's never found. But what you find, whatever you find, is only part of the missing, and writing is the way the poet finds out what it is he found.
What greater prestige can a man like me (not too gifted, but very understanding) have than to have taken a cheap, shoddy and utterly lost kind of writing, and have made of it something that intellectuals claw each other about?
As anthropomorphic and surreal people have said my early writing was, to me it was really stock and almost banal in the sense that it was just description, the poetry of comparing: "Your feet are like A, and your eyes like B."
The truly essential bargain between host and guest requires the guest only to respond promptly, show up on time, socialize with other guests, thank the host, write additional thanks and reciprocate. You needn't bring anything.
If you can't stand your own company alone in a room for long hours, or, when it gets tough, the feeling of being in a locked cell, or, when it gets tougher still, the vague feeling of being buried alive-then don't be a writer.
I write for those women who do not speak, for those who do not have a voice because they were so terrified, because we are taught to respect fear more than ourselves. We've been taught that silence would save us, but it won't.
In college, I think I probably positioned myself as an aspiring writer, meaning I dressed sort of extravagantly and adopted all the semi-Byronic affectations, as if I were writing, although I wasn't actually doing any writing.
Having been an actor and a writer for so long - 20 years or so - I felt that it would be daft to go to one's grave without having directed. It's a natural extension of writing and acting, and so I knew it would happen one day.
We were developing an innovative Personal Information Manager called Chandler but a couple years ago I took off from that to do a project writing down my memoirs essentially, reminiscing about the development of the Macintosh.
I've been accused over the years of being close to players, but if something needs to be written, I've tried my best to write it and write it in a way that is fair to whoever I'm writing about and is fair to all of my readers.
Characters more or less present themselves to me. I don't know their origins. I think if I did, if I seemed to myself to fabricate them, I could not induce suspension of disbelief in myself in the way writing fiction requires.
It's an interesting job, it's a fascinating job, I can't imagine anything that would have given me more satisfaction, and not everything I did was awful, but it was just writing another story in a world that's full of stories.
Lehman uses many conveyances—including the prose poem, the sestina, and curt rhymes—to travel across the writing life of a poet whose instinctive romanticism is always bracing and tough-minded, brimming with a rare generosity.
Then you start another book and suddenly the galley proofs of the last one come in and you have to wrench your attention away from what you're writing and try to remember what you were thinking when you wrote the previous one.
No matter what, when you major in theater arts whether you want to write or be a director or design scenery or whatever, when you are a freshman at UCLA then - I guess it's still the same way - you had to take an acting class.
The main thing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. Take off from here.
When I taught, a lot of my students weren't big readers, so they would write something and I realized that they thought it belonged in a book. Like, they didn't know what the inside of a book looked like, you know what I mean?
In my view the plangent artificiality of a lot of creative work results from the fact that the people who write novels, direct films and put on plays tend to read too many novels, watch too many films and go to too many plays.
I think anyone who has had a fight and who's a very good observer of the situation and people's behavior is capable of writing a fight. But you do start thinking about writing during the fights that you have with your partner.
A lot of crime fiction writing is also lazy. Personality is supposed to be shown by the protagonists taste in music, or were told that the hero looks like the young Cary Grant. Film is the medium these writers are looking for.
Don’t just read the Bible. Start circling the promises. Don’t just make a wish. Write down a list of God-glorifying life goals. Don’t just pray. Keep a prayer journal. Define your dream. Claim your promise. Spell your miracle.
To write without pay until somebody offers pay. If nobody offers pay within three years, the candidate may look upon this circumstance with the most implicit confidence as the sign that sawing wood is what he was intended for.
I write early in the morning. I just wake up whenever I feel awake and I have to be sitting and writing pretty soon after that. If I take too long to think about the impossibility of what I'm trying to, I'll be defeated by it.
When I was 17 I got a guitar for my birthday and started discovering Bob Dylan and James Taylor and the whole '60s thing, and that made me want to make songs, to go beyond just playing an instrument. I needed to write I guess.
I write what I see, the endless procession to the guillotine. Were all lined up, waiting for the crunch of the blade... the rivers of blood are flowing beneath our feet... Ive been to hell, young man, youve only read about it.
Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.
I'm a songwriter. My voice just serves what I'm writing about. So to let all that go, I mean, bring the sensibilities of it actually to the song choices, but to just be the interpreter was incredibly liberating and really fun.
It's important to look ahead, I think, to shape your stuff for - again - effect. Because it's just so easy to write long, flowy sentences, get lost in them. The hard part's making them matter, making yourself make them matter.
In the Air Force, I had an old Wilcox Gay recorder, and I used to hear guitar runs on that recorder going (vocalizing) like the chords on "I Walk The Line." And I always wanted to write a love song using that theme, that tune.
To me, it makes more sense to write different songs and to play different kinds of music and to find your own voice. But no matter what, get out and play for people. Get out and learn, and do everything that you can, you know?
Diminished circumstances had no effect on his sense of what was honorable: after The Spectator sent him a check for a piece it had accepted but was unable to run for a lack of space, he refused to write for the magazine again.
Writing Part of the Scenery has been a very different experience. I have been reminded of people and events, real and imaginary which have been part of my life. This book is a celebration of the land which means so much to me.
I only write when I'm angry or sad, so because that's when I just have to write... If I'm having a good time and I'm happy and things are going really well, why would I want to stop what I'm doing to go and write at the piano?
Why do they put pictures of criminals up in the Post Office? What are we supposed to do, write to them? Why don't they just put their pictures on the postage stamps so the postmen can look for them while they deliver the mail?
. . . what happened, of course, was that I was writing a play set in the 1940's that was supposed to be somehow representative of black American life, and I didn't have any women in there. And I knew that wasn't going to work.
We human beings are tuned such that we crave great melody and great lyrics. And if somebody writes a great song, it's timeless that we as humans are going to feel something for that and there's going to be a real appreciation.
And after about two years, I realized that creative writing was not going to help you ace those biological tests. So I switched over to journalism. I didn't graduate with honors, but I did graduate on time and with some doing.
To write music is to raise a ladder without a wall to lean it against. There is no scaffolding: the building under construction is held in balance only by the miracle of a kind of internal logic, an innate sense of proportion.
It's nice to be in a situation where the two books that I write for a sort of regular monthly income are also works that I enjoy immensely, rather than them being some kind of bread and butter, do it because you have to do it.
The people at the record company had asked me if I could write a song about my life, my relationship with God, and where I'm from. Well, I can't write a song on purpose, my songs come in a moment of inspiration or desperation.
You have girls that sing about guys ain't paying their bills and men are this and men are that and I write about women who want to go out for free, they don't want to pay for the dinner, they try to get over, they wanna leave.