Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We write to understand our deepest secrets to ourselves, to understand. We write in an outpouring of love. We write in secret, either for publication or for a journal no one will see, or we write poems to be privately printed for the eyes of friends alone - this is not our choice. The urge is to create. The outcome belongs to God.
When one crosses over from an activity, or the verb, of writing or doing, and becomes a noun, like "a writer" I think that is an act of supreme self-consciousness that I've never, in effect, made. I write, but I don't like to think of myself as a writer. I think it's somewhat self-aggrandizing and pretentious. Now, I am a teacher.
The only place where you could see life and death, i. e., violent death now that the wars were over, was in the bull ring and I wanted very much to go to Spain where I could study it. I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death.
They put me in an office with the TV set up and said "Here's the tape. When you're finished writing your copy for the little trailer you're going to do, you'll come out and show it to us and we set you up to go edit it." I turned it on and it was just this hardcore film and I was like, "Oh my God, I've fallen down the rabbit hole."
You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing.
A lot of [George Saunders] early stories now feel prophetic. Take the recent election [of Donald Trump]. Historians in 100 years might write about it as being the first internet election, in which what happened was actually an expression in the real world of a virtual reality. And you've been writing about that subject for a while.
Everyone had always told me I had to see alpine flowers, since I was writing about flowers, and I had never seen these. So I happened to be teaching a class at the University of Colorado, and I got to go for hikes that took me there. But my perspective was most often down at ground level, trying to see quite tiny exquisite flowers.
That underscored this idea that when we're reading a book or writing a book, you're in an act of co-creation. The reader and the writer are both trying to dress up and present their best selves and then there's that moment, when suddenly, as a reader, you're not exactly you anymore, and likewise, as a writer, you're not really you.
What I find interesting and heartening, though, is that there does seem to be a shift in the subject matter being written about by women that is doing well in the culture. We're seeing more women writing dystopian fiction, more women writing novels set post-apocalyptic settings, subjects and themes that used to be dominated by men.
Like most authors, I'm a raging egomaniac. I know that about myself. And I know that, if I had internet access, I would waste countless hours looking up things about myself, writing fake posts about how great I am and arguing with people who don't like my work. It saves me a lot of time and frustration to just stay out of the loop.
I think I have to work to write a happy song. I write them carefully; they're simple and they're about when it's fun to walk down the street. You know? Because that's the best thing about when you're happy. It's just one little thing that makes you happy, and you're making friends. The kind of thing I can do is capture this moment.
I do believe that one's writing life needs to be kept separate from Po-Biz. Personally, I deal with this by not attending too many poetry readings, primarily reading dead poets or poems in translation, reading Poets & Writers only once for grant/contest information before I quickly dispose of it, and not reading Poetry Daily. Ever.
But words came halting forth, wanting Invention's stay; Invention, Nature's child, fled stepdame Study's blows; And others' feet still seemed but strangers in my way. Thus, great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes, Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite: "Fool," said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart, and write.
Writing New People I was thinking a lot about the era that I came of age - the 90's. Brooklyn, in particular, this moment when I lived there. The sense of possibility. I was also trying to find a way to write about Jonestown. I had read about it a lot and I had the sense that the story could really start to drive one over the edge.
Let no one think that I do not love the old ministers. They were, probably, the best men in their generation, and they deserve that their biographies should fill the pages of the town histories. If I could but hear the "glad tidings" of which they tell, and which, perchance, they heard, I might write in a worthier strain than this.
Sometimes when I visit schools, kids will interview me for the school newspaper. They ask me questions and my answers tend to go on and on, and they try to write down everything I'm saying as quickly as they can. And one day, a kid holds up her hand and said, 'Do you think you could just answer 'yes' or 'no?' Aren't kids wonderful?
My dream role is to portray someone like James Baldwin. I've always been a fan of his writing, and I feel like he's one of our unsung heroes. He's been pretty much forgotten, and I think he needs to be recognized. He had to go all the way to Europe to find recognition and acceptance, and I'd just like to bring him to the forefront.
Research actually indicates that if you write down what you're grateful for, it increases your happiness by 25 percent. And who doesn't want that? And God's word says (1 Thessalonians 5), "Give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus." Who doesn't want to know exactly what God's will is for them?
I treat people who write me the way my friends and I all treat each other when we go to each other for advice, which is sometimes with supreme cruelty. I think that's what helps the advice sink in. If somebody comes at you with both barrels, the first shot opens your head, and the second shot allows the advice to get lodged inside.
If you want to understand what it means to be afraid, what fear as experienced by human beings is, then your focus must shift. No longer will you be satisfied with mechanical, physiological, neurological accounts. For this inquiry will require you to observe closely what human beings feel, sing, think, write and say to one another.
Writing is self-reinforcing. Don't make a fetish out of it, and don't surrender to the myth of the garret, or the myth of the chained muse. It's like playing the guitar, or practicing taekwondo, or having sex. The more you do, the better you get. The better you get, the better it feels. The better it feels, the more you want to do.
Software is inherently complicated. If you say to somebody I want an airline reservation system, to really say what you want in terms of overbooking and fares, and different airlines communicating with each or schedule changes, it's immensely complex. And so you can't write a program that's any simpler than that full specification.
I think I've lived a pretty hard life. What I mean by hard is that... I've been kind of reckless with things. I'm a passionate person. I'm a super passionate person. I think there's definitely been sorrow in my life, good and bad. I think it comes through. I hope it comes through in my writing because to me that's what artistry is.
I went door-to-door selling cable television subscriptions when I was in college. I found it incredibly difficult, doing that kind of sales work. I would have thought I'd be good at it, but I wasn't. It's so easy in acting. Everything falls into place when they write that you're a salesman. People just say yes, and then it's great.
If you had told me twenty years ago that I would write a novel set in Russia, much less two, I simply wouldn't have believed you. I had no familiarity with Russia or its history, but part of what drives me as a reader, and more and more as a writer, is curiosity, the desire to explore unfamiliar terrain and inhabit alternate lives.
For me, I love exploring ideas and throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what fits, and if I had a really nice collaborative team around me who could deal with the more day-to-day minutia, that would be fun. And directing sometime in the future and writing... yeah, I can see that all in my future. But I can be incredibly lazy.
I began to read the Holy Scriptures upon my knees, laying aside all other books, and praying over, if possible, every line and word...I would be so overpowered with a sense of God's Infinite Majestey, that I would be contrained to throw myself on the ground, and offer my soul as a blank in His hands, to write on it what He pleased.
I was also writing in a tradition and trying to do something different with it, something that hadn't necessarily been done before, which was a risk, but it made it interesting. My relationship with food has been complicated and rocky and not always wonderful, and it's a lens through which my entire life and identity are refracted.
The absurdly neurotic role you and the rest of your kind have always attributed to me Erato, the Goddess Muse of Erotic Poetry bears no relation at all to reality. As a matter of fact, I was trained as a clinical psychologist. Who simply happens to have specialized in the mental illness that you, in your ignorance, call literature.
The way Disney characters move, they're very kind of slow and fluid and flowing; one pose kind of eases into the next. If you look at a show like 'The Simpsons' and subsequently a show like 'Family Guy' - the characters will jerk from pose to pose a lot, a bit more snappy. Which sort of goes along with the writing tone of the show.
A scientific autobiography belongs to a most awkward literary genre. If the difficulties facing a man trying to record his life are great - and few have overcome them successfully - they are compounded in the case of scientists, of whom many lead monotonous and uneventful lives and who, besides, often do not know how to write . . .
I would like permission to fetch a note from my mother, sir' Ridcully sighed. 'Rincewind, you once informed me, to my everlasting puzzlement, that you never knew your mother because she ran away before you were born. Distinctly remember writing it down in my diary. Would you like another try?' 'Permission to go and find my mother?'
For the last few years I've tried to force myself to write at least one page every day, which doesn't sound like much but it's actually pretty hard to manage. Because I'm not allowed to do a make-up day. I can't do two pages the next day. The punishment for not completing my page is that I have to eat a vegetarian meal the next day.
We're on an indie label. We don't have mass marketing behind us, and we don't have big budgets. We do our own thing. We do exactly what we want to do. We produce our own music. We write ourselves. We record ourselves. We mix ourselves. The artwork is done by my brother. That's not selling out. We're doing exactly what we want to do.
As it now stands, I Enoch appears to consist of the following five major divisions: (1) The Book of the Watchers (chaps. 1-36); (2) The Book of the Similitudes (chaps. 37-7l)-, (3) The Book of Astronomical Writings (chaps. 72-82); (4) The Book of Dream Visions (chaps. 83-90); and (5) The Book of the Epistle of Enoch (chaps. 91-107).
Yeah, it's not that I wanted to do a painting, I wanted to do writing like that. What jolted me about Jasper Johns was how important it is to start with a convention, how important it is to start with what everybody knows and everybody takes for granted, whether it's a number, an alphabet letter, a set of alphabet letters, a target.
Some are exploring the world through the subconscious. I've done that on occasions for various reasons, whether it be illness or self abuse, or whatever. Once things start to look grotesque I don't write them or sing them. I couldn't write them - making nightmares into living daylight...The minute it gets dark I shoot back, retreat.
I had never really written songs for anyone before. With [Broken] Social Scene, you're writing songs for others and your passing them around and exchanging things, but for a man who has the history that Andy Kim had, and has lived the life that he's had, you see such a youthful aspect of how he just wanted to create something again.
Poetry and code - and mathematics - make us read differently from other forms of writing. Written poetry makes the silent reader read three kinds of pattern at once; code moves the reader from a static to an active, interactive and looped domain; while algebraic topology allows us to read qualitative forms and their transformations.
Harmony of period and melody of style have greater weight than is generally imagined in the judgment we pass upon writing and writers. As a proof of this, let us reflect what texts of scripture, what lines in poetry, or what periods we most remember and quote, either in verse or prose, and we shall find them to be only musical ones.
I think it's absolutely possible to write a song and go somewhere where no one's been before, uncharted territory. In terms of content, I see limitations where there should be none. I know there are things I wouldn't write about, but that shouldn't be the case. You should be able to make a song out of anything, out of any situation.
I sometimes have to write for a while before I figure it out, pretend that I know what I'm doing, sort of like ad-libbing on stage until you remember your line - you hope you sound convincing to the audience. The key is to have enough material, enough threads, so that there's something that can be satisfyingly drawn to a conclusion.
I've always really been interested in the Pygmalion myth and both what it has to say about creativity and what it has to say about relationships between men and women. I'd been thinking about what I would want to do with that if I was going to write on that theme, and one morning I woke up and Calvin and Ruby Sparks were in my head.
Writing is linear and sequential; Sentence B must follow Sentence A, and Sentence C must follow Sentence B, and eventually you get to Sentence Z. The hard part of writing isn't the writing; it's the thinking. You can solve most of your writing problems if you stop after every sentence and ask: What does the reader need to know next?
Editing should be, especially in the case of old writers, a counselling rather than a collaborating task. The tendency of the writer-editor to collaborate is natural, but he should say to himself, 'How can I help this writer to say it better in his own style?' and avoid 'How can I show him how I would write it, if it were my piece?'
'Don't Kill My Vibe' was made in a writing session, by Martin Sjolie and I, after he'd asked me what I'd been thinking about lately. I started talking about this earlier writing session that was quite difficult. The song is about the feeling of not being respected as a person, and I think that's something that speaks to millennials.
Way back in the day, when I first started and had delusions of adequacy as a cartoonist, I would listen to music. When I switched to a career as a writer, I would try to listen to music, but if the songs had lyrics they would get in the way of the words I was trying to write. So I switched to listening to purely instrumental pieces.
I believe that a writer learns from every story he writes, and when you try different things, you learn different lessons. Working with other writers, as in Hollywood or in a shared world series, will also strengthen your skills, by exposing you to new ways of seeing the work, and different approaches to certain creative challenges.
I wanted to write and then I saw Pierrot and I understand that I could express myself in a more... Also probably, I had an intuition that if I was going to only write, I will stay in one room all the time and never go out. I felt that if I was going to make movies, I would have to communicate with people and it would be good for me.
When I'm writing I don't feel any pressure. It's after I'm done that I start freaking out. But really, when I'm in Lebanon, I don't write much because I'm surrounded by family. I feel immersed, or enmeshed, in too many currents. I love that, but it's not conducive to writing. In San Francisco, nothing interferes with me but my cats.