Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
If anything in your life is more important than writing - anything at all - you should walk away now while you still can. Forewarned is forearmed. For those who cannot or will not walk away, you need only to remember this. Writing is life. Breathe deeply of it.
I always thought of writing as public, I never thought of writing a diary. I had been struck by, jolted by things I had read, and I wanted to do the same to others. I don't think it ever was the notion of an autobiography; I skipped that phase totally, I think.
Back in my 20s, when I wrote 'A Place of Greater Safety,' the French Revolution novel, I thought, 'I'll always have to write historical novels because I can't do plots.'' But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to invent things.
If you try to control it too much, the book is dead. You have to let it fall apart quite early on and let it start doing its own thing. And that takes nerve, not to panic that the book you were going to write is not the book you will have at the end of the day.
Language gradually varies, and with it fade away the writings of authors who have flourished their allotted time; otherwise, the creative powers of genius would overstock the world, and the mind would be completely bewildered in the endless mazes of literature.
The one thing I try to do with everything I write is open people's eyes to those they normally ignore or dismiss. To make people aware of the "other" side of things. That someone's circumstances may not be what you think they are or what they show to the world.
If I was writing a song one night, I would leave the studio and come back the next day, and if I could remember the same melody on the same song, it was definitely something worth working more on. If I couldn't remember it, maybe there was a purpose about that.
If you write nonfiction, a historical account of what really happened, first of all, it's always White men who do that and you don't have the voices that are really interesting to me, of the people who are not sheltered by the big umbrella of the establishment.
I had some bad jobs when I was young. Writing is not one of them. If you're fortunate enough to reach my age, to still be writing, you have to be grateful, and I am. I've been lucky. For many years, all I've done is writing, and it's all I've ever wanted to do.
I write about the things that happen to us all. The things that are tough, the things that matter, from a loved one fighting an illness, to losing a job, being betrayed by somebody you trust, all parts of the human condition. No one is exempt from those things.
The minute I landed back in Alaska, it was back to hip boots and fish guts. This cultural flipping wasn't easy - especially on top of the post-divorce fighting that was still going on between my parents. But this is why you don't write a memoir at age fourteen.
I suppose that there are endeavors in which self-confidence is even more important than it is in writing -- tightrope walking comes immediately to mind -- but it's difficult for me to think of anybody producing much writing if his confidence is completely shot.
It seems like songwriting for most songwriters is only one season in their life, a five or ten year period. For me, I don't worry about it, but I know there might come a day when I can't write anymore, or don't have good song ideas or the fire to do it anymore.
When I was first writing, I used to sit at the piano and play songs - I'd write one or two a night. It was my hobby. At some point, it then became a process that was mainly done within the context of the studio, and writing became part of the recording process.
I try to write every day. Sometimes the things come out well, and sometimes they don't. When they come out well you think, Wow, I must be really great; and when they come out poorly, you think you must be terrible, but the truth is that's how any process works.
Well, what we do is we have a script, of course. But for us, writing is also like storyboarding. It's drawing. And so we will cut all of those drawings together with music, sound effects and dialogue. And we screen this kind of stick-figure version of the film.
I don't think it's people's utterances that limit the writing. It's the activity itself. It's actually pretty hard to convey to someone who's not a surfer. The sensation is the thing. And it's tough to describe without resorting to clichés or mystical nonsense.
I would run into the corner store, the bodega, and just grab a paper bag or buy juice - anything just to get a paper bag. And I'd write the words on the paper bag and stuff these ideas in my pocket until I got back. Then I would transfer them into the notebook.
When you are writing the kind of criticism you hope you're writing, everything depends on keeping your calm or your cool. You're trying to tell someone about something that they may know nothing about. They depend on you to read or interpret as best as you can.
Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.
I tell myself I write because I want to say something true and original about the nature of evil. That is very ambitious - to say something about the human condition that hasn't been written before. Probably I will never succeed but that is what I strive to do.
Conflict is the microscope of a book. When it's trained on a character, you see what's underneath the narratives of physical description. You see whether someone is strong or weak, principled or apathetic, heroic or villainous." (J.R. on writing the BDB series)
I see the author as the person who has written; the writer, the one involved in the process of writing. And they're not necessarily friends. The writer is the one I want to reinforce; the author would just feed on the reviews - so I'm in favour of starving him.
When I was a little boy in short pants, I dreamed about a miraculous ointment that would make me invisible. Then I became an adult, began to write, and wanted to be successful. Now I'm successful and would like to have the ointment that would make me invisible.
Why haven't we fixed sick yet? You scientists there-- put down those starfish and HELP us. I hereby demand that all the people who are good at math make the world free of illness. The rest of us will write you epic poems and staple them together into a booklet.
And the reason you hate writing so much is because you start analyzing your work before you're done pouring it onto the page. Your Left-brain won't let your Right-brain do it's job ... Your Right-brain gets the words on the page. The Left-brain makes them sing.
The Journal is not essentially a confession, a story about oneself. It is a Memorial. What does the writer have to remember? Himself, who he is when he is not writing, when he is living his daily life, when he is alive and real, and not dying and without truth.
I believe in hope, in what is something called ”radical hope.” I believe there is hope for all of us, even amid the suffering. And that’s why I write fiction, probaby. It’s my attempt to keep that fragile strand of radical hope, to buld a fire in the darkness.r
For me, when I'm writing something really personal, I don't feel good about it. It's weird that people can connect to it and like something that came from a really crap place. You have to be quite brave to write about something that you honestly feel and think.
Computer programming is really a lot like writing a recipe. If you've read a recipe, you know what the structure of a recipe is, it's got some things up at the top that are your ingredients, and below that, the directions for how to deal with those ingredients.
I'd always hoped to write the story as a novel, but there was a long period when the [Bridget Jones's Baby: The Diaries] movie was stalled and in confusion. I felt frustrated creatively, and just couldn't work on the Baby material till the movie was sorted out.
Even though I don't write about things that come from my life because I'm lucky, and I live in a great place with great kids and, you know, a great husband, I think you can find threads of me in the characters, so that's really what being a writer is, probably.
Writing and making films aren't different things to me. Or maybe it has become so, now. Making film is a very long process and you have to be physically strong. The literary work is more mystical, because it's only the writer, and connected to something inside.
I've done that quite often, but I've got to be quite honest... as much as you would want to only do one at a time, sometimes projects overlap and there's nothing you can do. Sometimes you to have begin writing a new project just as you're finishing off another.
Even if you're an observer of a story that you yourself made up, you're still very much connected to it. You love it and feel it, no less than somebody's who's writing from their direct 'I' or 'me.' I'm just so much more interesting in stories than confessions.
I hadn't read or heard a lot about [Tom] Wolfe until I read this script, and in that way I think it was really clever to write a piece about him instead of Max Perkins,[Ernest] Hemingway, [John] Fitzgerald, or others that people have strong opinions of already.
My second album was written while I was on the road promoting the first record. I tried to take my personal experiences and elevate them to universal experiences, so that I wasn't writing songs about living on a tour bus or being on a TV set for the first time.
I knew I wanted to work with Brad [Falchuk] and Ian [Brennan] again on something comedic, and we are having a blast writing SCREAM QUEENS. We hope to create a whole new genre - comedy-horror - and the idea is for every season to revolve around two female leads.
I just don't know what makes a picture, really - the thing that makes it is something unique, as far as I can understand. Just like one guy can write a sentence and it's beautiful and another one can write it and it's dead. What the difference is, I don't know.
I find if you're targeting Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X right from the start, your code will probably work anywhere else that you might try it later. Writing code that is cross-platform from the start requires more discipline, but I find it is worth the effort.
I never thought about writing. I was married young, I was still in college, as we did then, and I had two babies before I was 25, and I loved them, and I loved taking care of them, but I was a little bit cuckoo, staying at home and not having a creative outlet.
I never feel that I have comprehended an emotion, or fully lived even the smallest events, until I have reflected upon it in my journal; my pen is my truest confidant, holding in check the passions and disappointments that I dare not share even with my beloved.
I'm sure we would not have had men on the Moon if it had not been for Wells and Verne and the people who write about this and made people think about it. I'm rather proud of the fact that I know several astronauts who became astronauts through reading my books.
I am only a little pencil in the hand of our Lord. He may cut or sharpen the pencil. He may write or draw whatever and whenever he wants. If the writing or drawing is good, we do not honor the pencil or the material that is used, but rather the one who used it.
I don’t even know what I’m writing, I have no idea, I don’t know anything, and I’m not reading over it, and I’m not correcting my style, and I’m writing just for the sake of writing, just for the sake of writing more to you… My precious, my darling, my dearest!
When you're writing about something that happened, it helps you transition to the present. Ironically enough, by focusing on your presidency, it helps you realize that you're no longer the president. By reliving moments, it helps you stay focused on the moment.
I think if you write humor, then people don't - you know - they don't give you that much credit. They tend to think you just dictate your stories into a tape recorder. And I'm not necessarily insulted by that, because I think that just means that it looks easy.
I took two fiction-writing courses in college and majored in literature. I felt that I had a knack though I wouldn't go so far as to call it a talent. But it scared me. I felt it was a childish thing wanting to write and that I would forget about it eventually.
If you're writing a book that takes place in New York in the moment, you can't not write about 9-11; you can't not integrate it. My main character's view is the Statue of Liberty and the Trade Center. It doesn't have to take over, but it has to be acknowledged.
When I write a new draft, I don't like to feel I'm tied to any previous version. That's why I don't use a computer to write. The text looks, on the screen, too much like a book. It's not a book - it's a bad first draft of something that could one day be a book.