Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Most of my writing is an effort, one way or another, to figure something out about myself, and often when I read dialogue between my characters I recognize it as a discussion between two aspects of my own personality, aspects which are too often at odds.
Children should learn to draw as they learn to write, and such a mystery should not be made of it. They should be encouraged, not flattered... then [later in life] double the effort is required to get the facility which might have been gained insensibly.
Writing can be bad and still be part of something good. That 'art' is really 'artifact,' Exhibit A, Exhibit B, of something else: a person's whole experience and life. And that always there's the chance that this will fail. That things will not work out.
The more settled I've become, the more problematic my characters have become. There was a period when I wrote sensitive and gentle songs and these came at a time when life was at its most destructive. I think you write about what you need, on some level.
It takes great self-confidence to write a newspaper column. Some might say it takes arrogance. Be that as it may, my willingness to pronounce on a great many matters of which I have little or no knowledge is one of my prime qualifications for this trade.
The Practice I was on for seven years and it was a law show, so I really - a lot of objections and things like that, lots of long, long monologues that David Kelly used to write me, which were great. I was really lucky to have my first show go that long.
My friends, we all improvise together usually. So we write what I think is a good script but always leave a lot of room to find stuff on the day; and we always do find something. That's the advantage to having actors who are, in their own right, writers.
My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial intention of an accomplished one: in other words, I am more interested in the high ideas of a feeble executant than in the high execution of a feeble thinker.
If and when I do get "down," the last thing on my mind is writing a song. Usually, being bummed just involves lying around on the couch and taking the bad weather personally. I only write songs when I feel good - or at least something approaching "good."
When I'm constructing a poem, I'm trying to write one good line after another. One solid line after another. You know a lot of the lines - some hold up better as lines than others. But I'm not thinking of just writing a paragraph and then chopping it up.
But the commission is now. The time to speak is when the Spirit of God boils the message so hot within you that it must come out. The time to write is when God Almighty presses his thumb against your heart and forces the words out like a steaming geyser.
Most acting today on television is like a locomotive on a track. Everybody knows what they are doing. The problem of writing today is everyone sounds the same. We speak differently. We think differently. People are different. And that's the beauty of it.
I enjoy the research element. There are so many stories from the past that interest me, that I want to learn more about, just as an interested person. And if I'm going to learn, if I'm going to research, it's probably going to lead me to writing a novel.
I have insane curiosity as to what happened in all these events. I will never know. I'm not a researcher. I don't possess that kind of mind. I have a researcher who compiles the fact sheets and chronologies that allow me to write these big books of mine.
We get so many people saying short fiction is not economical, that it doesn't sell; but there are so many of us enjoying writing it and reading it. So it's wonderful to be around people who love short fiction too - it's like hanging around with my tribe.
Anyone who has ever been privileged to direct a film also knows that, although it can be like trying to write 'War and Peace' in a bumper car in an amusement park, when you finally get it right, there are not many joys in life that can equal the feeling.
Writing is a conversation with reading; a dialogue with thinking. All conversations with older people contain repetition. Some of the ideas mean a lot to me, just interesting, so I both embrace and attack the ideas because I found them, well, delightful.
Now that I believe in God, I have an extra layer of saying I'll write about what I write about and assume that I'm being offered the opportunity to illuminate something important. But when you think you are too important, you become some sort of fascist.
I'm not going to tell a person how to think, don't believe in that. What I want to do, when I write these books, is just to say don't be so sure of yourself. Let me pull the carpet out from underneath you, and let's see if you can still find the footing.
Someone ought to write a novel about me,” said Lebedeva loftily. “I shouldn’t care if they lied to make it more interesting, as long as they were good lies, full of kisses and daring escapes and the occasional act of barbarism. I can’t abide a poor liar.
Writing is simple. First you have to make sure you have plenty of paper... sharp pencils... typewriter ribbon. Then put your belly up to the desk... roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter... and stare at it until beads of blood appear on your forehead.
Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.
Writing a novel is an act of self-annihilation as much as self-discovery. You can kill whole appetites and flood whole depths while plumbing them, but if you are serious about it you also get to put something into the world that wasn't quite there before.
It was Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.
I was naïve when I was young, I was sheltered. I had illusions about who I was going to be, delusions, and a little bit of pretentiousness. And I thought, "I'll write the guy like that. It'll allow me to make fun of everyone else if I make fun of myself."
I remember when I started writing lyrics, I was very grand. I tried to use a lot of symbols,because I thought that's how songwriting should be - with imagery and metaphor. I figured, after a while, maybe I should just write it as I would say in real life.
I write every day and I just love doing it. It's just... it's just a wonderful thing. Some of my stories work, some of them don't work. Some of them are wild and I love them, but they certainly don't fit into any kind of a normal system that I know about.
A writer needs loneliness, and he gets his share of it. He needs love, and he gets shared and also unshared love. He needs friendship. In fact, he needs the universe. To be a writer is, in a sense, to be a day-dreamer - to be living a kind of double life.
When we are writing, or painting, or composing, we are, during the time of creativity, freed from normal restrictions, and are opened to a wider world, where colors are brighter, sounds clearer, and people more wondrously complex than we normally realize.
If we compel the composer to write in terms of what the listener is able to hear, we flirt with the danger of freezing the evolution of musical language, whose progressive development comes about through transgressions of a given era's perceptual habits."
Different critics go to different lengths to disagree with that sentiment, but ultimately, they're the person experiencing this art, and whatever judgment or taste they use is internal, and says more about them than about the record they're writing about.
Songs come when they wanna come and I'll work at it when I feel like working at it. There are some songwriters that write every day, and I'm definitely not one of those guys. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. It's just kind of what I do.
Who does not know history's first law to be that an author must not dare to tell anything but the truth? And its second that he must make bold to tell the whole truth? That there must be no suggestion of partiality anywhere in his writings? Nor of malice?
There are terrific TV shows now. This is a golden age for TV humor, I think. There's an actual market there. Of course, I have no idea how you'd break in, but there must be a way. They have all these shows and they need jokes and somebody is writing them.
Architectural kitsch is most common in the commercial pop vernacular - typified by the Big Duck of 1931 in Flanders, New York, a Long Island roadside poultry stand resembling a duck, which Venturi and Scott Brown made a cult object through their writings.
I love melody, and that's what I love about pop music. The words can become what they are through a special melody. I learned to play guitar by myself, and writing songs came with playing guitar, so the writing isn't one part and the music something else.
Will Arnett and I were never in the same room, but once I saw early animation we started writing music for that and then he just kind of did his little rap over top, some of it was free form and some of it I made up, we all just kind of contributed to it.
Fiction writers have their own world, and poets have their own world, and literary criticism has sort of passed over into cultural studies in the university, and so on. They seem more disconnected from each other than they did when I first began to write.
In writing 'The Satanic Verses,' I think I was writing for the first time from the whole of myself. The English part, the Indian part. The part of me that loves London, and the part that longs for Bombay. And at my typewriter, alone, I could indulge this.
I have turned away from the thought of writing fiction in the past through what I suppose is, actually, fear. The direct, raw invitation for the reader to come in and explore my imagination is fairly scary for me so I have busied myself with so much else.
A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
For all the years I'd spent talking about pictures, the truth was that I had no idea how to draw or what it felt like to do it. I would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn't produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?
Wild, dark times are rumbling toward us, and the prophet who wishes to write a new apocalypse will have to invent entirely new beasts, and beasts so terrible that the ancient animal symbols of St. John will seem like cooing doves and cupids in comparison.
Write every day; never give up; it's supposed to be difficult; try to find some pleasure and reward in the act of writing, because you can't look for praise from editors, readers, or critics. In other words, tips that are much easier to give than to take.
Yes, one uses what one knows, but autobiography means something else. I should never be able to write a real autobiography; I always end by falsifying and fictionalizing—I’m a liar, in fact. That means I’m a novelist, after all. I write about what I know.
I think it's common sense to shy away from the erotic. Perhaps this grand experiment, which started with Lady Chatterley's Lover, of seeing what you can write and how you can write about sex, has reached a certain weary terminus with Fifty Shades of Grey.
Yeah, well I can't see a situation where I wouldn't at least re-write as a director something I was going to direct. At the moment, I wouldn't direct anything that I hadn't written. I can now say, as everybody else says, that it all depends on the script.
I don't mean to be flippant about cancer - it was hard, it was tough and it was scary. Then my next manuscript was about cancer because I had a whole new topic to write about. And because I wrote, it didn't take over. Writing took the chaos out of cancer.
My family was big on sharing. I guess it was just the way I was brought up. Or maybe, I read those fairy tales in which one good turn elicits another. But in writing, yes, some older writers were kind to me when I was young; although some others were not.
It is not histories I am writing, but lives; and in the most glorious deeds there is not always an indication of virtue or vice, indeed a small thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation of a character than battles where thousands die.