Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
In making Achilles and Patroclus lovers, I wasn't trying to speak for all gay men, just as when I write straight characters, I don't claim to speak for all straight people. My job as an author is to give voice to these very particular characters - these two men, in this time, and in this place
To me, the process of writing is just reading what I've written and - like running your hand over one of those mod glass stovetops to find where the heat is - looking for where the energy is in the prose, then going in the direction of that. It's an exercise in being open to whatever is there.
Right when I started getting solid was when I was offered a lot of writing work. And when The Ben Stiller Show was picked up, I realized there was no way for me to do stand-up three or four nights a week and run this television show with Ben. So that was the moment when I had to make a choice.
What's invaluable about actually going to the places you want to write about are the random accidental things that happen. Random, accidental detail is the best way to make a setting convincing. You can of course invent your own random details, and sometimes I will also mash up real incidents.
The one thing emphasized in any creative writing course is 'write what you know,' and that automatically drives a wooden stake through the heart of imagination. If they really understood the mysterious process of creating fiction, they would say, 'You can write about anything you can imagine.'
I think, there were probably problems with show business where producers and directors would try to get the writing credit also. So they created a rule where the bar, to get your name added to the writing credits, if you've done a revision, is very high if you're also the producer or director.
I'm one dude that writes his adlibs. I don't just go in there and say "Gimme a track." I say what I'ma say here [then] I put effects on my voice. Why not? I wrote it. Why not show the talent? Why be scared? That's why I hate certain fans who hate cause it's not like raw hip-hop, like boom bap.
I'm boggled by the idea of being an only child. I know nothing at all (I'm happy to say) about having had a cold and withholding mother, about being divorced. The more I've been writing novels, each novel I've written has become successively less grounded in anything approaching autobiography.
I'm okay for things like theater and stuff but for film, I just didn't think in the right way and I didn't like the business. So I was unhappy. So I was in something that was moderately related to my, what I call my calling or my life's path, which is writing, but it wasn't like the right fit.
The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring. It is the sensation of a stunt pilot's turning barrel rolls, or an inchworm's blind rearing from a stem in search of a route. At its worst, it feels like alligator wrestling, at the level of the sentence.
Working on 'Raising Hope' is a very hurry-up-and-wait activity, and I just always liked the idea of being as productive as I can be. I write because I don't just want that time to dissolve, where I'm sitting in a trailer staring blankly at the paintings of moccasins that came with the trailer.
That is my essential reason for writing, not for fame, not to be celebrated after death, but to heighten and create life all around me. I also write because when I am writing I reach the high moment of fusion sought by the mystics, the poets, the lovers, a sense of communion with the universe.
Some things need to be a song. Some things need to be a play. Some things need to be a painting. Some things need to be-though I'd never be a choreographer-some things might ought to be a dance [laughs]. I've found that exploring an idea in different ways, it gives you different opportunities.
Anyone writing a picture-book biography of Lincoln has a different set of responsibilities from someone writing a biography for sixth-graders, say, or from a Lincoln scholar writing an academic book on Lincoln. Each of these writers has a different audience and different goals. That's obvious.
I think scrin writers like to see how people bring their words to life, and it's always surprising. Always, no matter what, whether it's good or bad, it's always surprising because a whole human being is coming to that piece of writing. And certainly there's inspiration that comes out of that.
To become self-aware, people must be allowed to hear a plurality of opinions and then make up their own minds. They must be allowed to say, write and publish whatever they want. Freedom of expression is the most basic, but fundamental, right. Without it, human beings are reduced to automatons.
Writing is incredibly hard. But I want to do it. That said, I make it the top priority in every day, which for me means the first hours after getting out of bed in the morning. I've been doing it enough years now that I don't even think about waiting for my muse to show up, I just get to work.
My friend advised me to go into studying art, which at first shocked me because art was so easy. It was just something I did, like breathing or brushing my teeth. It couldn't be a job. I had a much more difficult time writing plays, making myself sit at that typewriter and finish those things.
I had learned a little about writing from Soldier's Pay - how to approach language, words: not with seriousness so much as an essayist does, but with a kind of alert respect, as you approach dynamite; even with joy, as you approach women: perhaps with the same secretly unscrupulous intentions.
I'm afraid of coaching, of writer's classes, of writer's magazines, of books on how to write. They give me centipede trouble - you know the yarn about the centipede who was asked how he managed all his feet? He tried to answer, stopped to think about it, and was never able to walk another step.
I'm in a business where there's complete anarchy. You can't control it - you can only react to it. The control that people traditionally had over their message is gone. Look at Wikileaks: you have to approach everything you write on the basis it's going to be on the front page of the newspaper.
I imagine as long as people will continue to read novels, people will continue to write them, or vice versa; unless of course the pictorial magazines and comic strips finally atrophy man's capacity to read, and literature really is on its way back to the picture writing in the Neanderthal cave.
I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. Dumbo got airborne with the help of a magic feather; you may feel the urge to grasp a passive verb or one of those nasty adverbs for the same reason. Just remember before you do that Dumbo didn’t need the feather; the magic was in him.
The Internet is a limitless library at your fingertips. It's a great place to start with the acquisition of knowledge. My process is to go to a place when I'm writing about it. Nothing captures the essence, feeling and flavor of a place better than when I'm actually there and doing the writing.
Just as anyone who listens to the muse will hear, you can write out of your own intention or out of inspiration. There is such a thing. It comes up and talks. And those who have heard deeply the rhythms and hymns of the gods, can recite those hymns in such a way that the gods will be attracted.
If I could have found what I needed at thirteen, I would not have lost so much of my life chasing vindication or death. Give some child, some thirteen-year old, the hope of the remade life. Tell the truth. Write the story that you were always afraid to tell. I swear to you there is magic in it.
Readers take in dialogue one thought at a time. A frequent mistake of beginners is to combine thoughts, which may be suitable for other forms of writing but not for dialogue. Another mistake is speechifying. Three sentences at a time is tops, yet many beginners write speeches that go on and on.
I tend to discourage people from calling me 'Sir Ian,' because I don't like being separated out from the rest of the population. Of course, it can be useful if you're writing an official letter, like trying to get a visa or something passed through Parliament. They're impressed by these things.
When I naturally write a story and I feel that the guy is sitting across the table from the girl and flirting with her... I think, 'God, that can't be me' because I'm just too old for that part. You need a 30-year-old or a 35-year-old for that part. And so I've given myself less and less roles.
Lily Brown writes with and against things in poems that are coiled up tight as springs (or snakes). A believer in the power of the line, she writes, 'I think the plastics/and sink them' then 'Where is the sand/man hiding the dirt.' These terse, biting poems will make you look around and wonder.
Every Republican’s voted for it. Look at what they value and look at their budget and what they’re proposing. Romney wants to let the – he said in the first 100 days he’s going to let the big banks once again write their own rules – unchain Wall Street. They’re gonna put you all back in chains.
Being a mother is the perfect experience for any writer. You learn how to not waste time. The writing hours become incredibly precious and concentrated because the rest of your day is completely packed with diapers, edible liquid foods that look like pooh, tiny bathtubs, and unconditional love.
One doesn't simply write about Lyndon Johnson. You get the Johnson treatment from beyond the grave - arm around you, nose to nose. I should admit that he also reminds me of my father, quite an overbearing and narcissistic character. And in some ways, he reminds me of myself. Another workaholic.
There should be two main objectives in ordinary prose writing: to convey a message and to include in it nothing that will distract the reader's attention or check his habitual pace of reading - he should feel that he is seated at ease in a taxi, not riding a temperamental horse through traffic.
It sometimes is better to write in a more directed, focused way when the pages are aimed at something already, a mission statement or a basic spine that represents the theme or the concept that you've agreed on, and writing partners are great for that because you can sit there until you get it.
One metric catches people. We prefer businesses that drown in cash. An example of a different business is construction equipment. You work hard all year and there is your profit sitting in the yard. We avoid businesses like that. We prefer those that can write us a check at the end of the year.
We writers don't really think about whether what we write is good or not. It's too much to worry about. We just put the words down, trying to get them right, operating by some inner sense of pitch and proportion, and from time to time, we stick the stuff in an envelope and ship it to an editor.
I've always thought that a lot of really good writers go wrong by getting so into the craft and the technique and perfection. Perfection can be the enemy sometimes. Some songs don't need to be told perfectly. Life is messy and has loose ends, and sometimes I think the songs should reflect that.
I think it's hard to really write a song that will educate someone because songs are meant to be ... you don't want to be too didactic in a song because it doesn't make for good music. And I think the role of songs can be to inspire people but there needs to education and prose to back that up.
By the time I wrote those first three songs for his new CD ... I wanted to push the poetics as hard as I could push them, and not decide the songs were finished until I committed them to whatever the recording format was. I went through drafts right up until I recorded every single one of them.
I enjoy the opportunity to use swear symbols. The reader reads into them something worse than what you normally would have. They work as this outburst of incoherent anger. I've found ways to write around swearing that are much more effective, rather than going for what someone really would say.
I'm the perfect amount of guarded. I don't reveal too much, and I never reveal who the songs are about. They are real life. People get that. I date a lot of musicians and they do the same thing. People that work with me - who I write about too - they get it. It's my creative outlet, my therapy.
I feel like for me the lyric writing really comes from just what's going on in my heart and that's what consumes me; think a lot of our heart is relationships. Not just with boyfriend or girlfriend but all your relationships in your life with other people and our interactions with other humans.
Any satirist writing a futuristic novel who had imagined a President Reagan during the Eisenhower years would have been accused of perpetrating a piece of crude, contemptible, adolescent, anti-American wickedness, when, in fact, he would have succeeded, as prophetic sentry, where Orwell failed.
I always wanted praise and I always wanted attention; I won't lie to you. I was a jazz critic and that wasn't good enough for me. I wanted people to write about me, not me about them. So I thought, What could I do? I can't sing, I can't dance, I can't act or anything like that. OK, I can write.
Mann was profoundly influenced by two philosophers, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, who returned to the most ancient of all philosophical questions - "How to live?" - and whose writings offered novel perspectives for considering that question (much more perspective-offering than rigorous argument!)
If you want to be a singer, you've got to concentrate on it twenty-four hours a day. You can't be a well driller, too. You've got to concentrate on the business of entertaining and writing songs. Always think different from the next person. Don't ever do a song as you heard somebody else do it.
And here I am, instead of there. I'm sitting in this library, thousands of miles from my life, writing another letter I know I won't be able to send, no matter how hard I try and how much I want to. How did that boy making love behind that shed become this man writing this letter at this table?
What I enjoy most are those times when I get an idea and it just flows - the words coming so fast that I'm scribbling to keep up with my characters. I don't have any writing must-haves; this is a good thing, since I've done a lot of my writing in random places like the playground or the subway.
I never listen to music when I am writing. It would be impossible. I listen to Bach in the mornings, mostly choral music; also some Handel, mostly songs and arias; I like Schubert's and Beethoven's chamber music and Sibelius' symphonies; for opera, I listen to Mozart and in recent years Wagner.