Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The love of writing comes at a very early age. For me, for instance, comic books so affected me. And a lot of people who come up to me and start talking about writing, when I start talking to them about the "Fantastic Four," they look at me aghast. They say, "'The Fantastic Four?' That's not literature." I say, "Yeah, but it was when I was 11 years old." This was literature.
It would just be a pamphlet. Three pages. The first page would be Drugs I Have Taken and then a list. The next page would be People I Have Slept With and then another list. Then the last page would be Famous People I Have Partied With and then another list. Because that's all people write in their autobiographies. Cut out all the bullshit and it's just a three-page pamphlet.
Christina Baker Kline writes exquisitely about two unlikely friends—one, a 91-year-old survivor of the grinding poverty of rural Ireland, immigrant New York and the hardscrabble Midwest; and the other, a casualty of a string of foster homes—each struggling to transcend a past of isolation and hardship. Orphan Train will hold you in its grip as their fascinating tales unfold.
I'm interested in the way that the language of labor has been suppressed in our culture, the way it has disappeared from our vocabulary and is never heard on stage. . . . I'm better at writing than I am at organizing [political action]. SLAUGHTER CITY is my small contribution. If it gives people a voice it is worth something. So often we forget what we are no longer hearing.
I spent almost two years working on this book ['March'] before we ever had a publisher, before we ever had a title. And when you're reading it, and you're writing it, and you're ingesting it, sometimes a single word just comes up over and over and over again. And if you're trying to capture the essence of what it is you're trying to tell, you don't have a whole lot of space.
there was no crime in unconscious plagiarism; that I committed it everyday, that he committed it everyday, that every man alive on earth who writes or speaks commits it every day and not merely once or twice but every time he open his mouth… there is nothing of our own in it except some slight change born of our temperament, character, environment, teachings and associations
We had stayed up all night, my friends and I, under hanging mosque lamps with domes of filigreed brass, domes starred like our spirits, shining like them with the prisoned radiance of electric hearts. For hours we had trampled our atavistic ennui into rich oriental rugs, arguing up to the last confines of logic and blackening many reams of paper with our frenzied scribbling.
The only thing I've consistently been interested in in the last twenty-five years is writing very short texts. That continues to interest me as a project, to contain some part of reality, which is chaotic by definition, in a contained space. I like small apartments. I like getting rid of stuff. I went through my files yesterday and spent hours shredding things. It was great.
The reason why so few good books are written is, that so few people that can write know anything. In general an author has always lived in a room, has read books, has cultivated science, is acquainted with the style and sentiments of the best authors, but he is out of the way of employing his own eyes and ears. He has nothing to hear and nothing to see. His life is a vacuum.
The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.
I reach readers rather unintentionally, I think, and those readers likely connect with the slant, the off-kilter, the part of the road you can barely see from the well-traveled road. So, when I'm writing, I'm not thinking about audience at all. Instead, I'm trying to see behind those shrubs, down that hidden path. We're the weirdos of the world and there are so many weirdos.
One question is: Who is the working class today, and how has it changed? Where are we in that? I don't have a knee-jerk kind of 1930s thing about we must build the unions and that's the way to the future. I'm writing this book right now called Pallin' Around, and the subtitle is: "Talking to the Tea Party." And frankly I find talking to the Tea Party exhilarating, I love it.
I have a mouse, but don't have a mouse driver for MINIX and have never felt the need to write one. Typing "rm x y z" is a lot faster than clicking five times and then having to convince the system that you really, truly, mean it and this is not a mistake and that you are consenting adult over 18 and that you completely understand the consequences and you still want to do it.
Complicated Grief was written in larger and more coherent (if disparate) shapes. The question was how they fit together. The mind is coherent, trust that was the best writing advice I ever got (I got it from Carole Maso and I pass it on). It's true, and clearer and clearer as one grows and gains an improved sense of who one actually is (as versus who one was supposed to be).
I think that if I get into the habit of writing a bit about what happens, or rather doesn't happen, I may lose a little of the sense of isolation and desolation which abides with me. My circumstances allowing of nothing but the ejaculation of one-syllabled reflections, a written monologue by that most interesting being, myself, may have its yet to be discovered consolations.
I got called to write for Aerosmith, nothing ever came of it, but I ended up spending the day with Steven Tyler and going to his house and we sat down at the piano, just me and him, and he sang for me and played, then he asked me to sing for him, and then we sang harmony together. That was just a big moment where it was like 'oh my god, my life is crazy!' It was really cool.
In a way I do hate the process of writing. It's like learning a role where you never think you're going to be able to conquer it when you start and it just takes enough focus and narrowing and getting enthusiastic and not losing it and so on. It's never good enough, but you aim for something and you hope it comes somewhat close. But it is a pleasure once you have written it.
I don't buy into the idea that an Irish writer should write about Ireland, or a gay writer should write about being gay. But when I found the right story, I saw it as an opportunity to write about being a teenager and being gay. Most people, whether you're gay or straight or whatever, have experienced that relationship where one person is much more interested than the other.
I think I write or publish as much as I do because I can bear being without a book to work on. But routinely when I finish a book, I think, "What will I do? Where will I get an idea?" And a kind of low-level panic sets in. And then eventually something happens. I don't know. If I knew how it happened I would repeat the process, but I don't know - something just occurs to me.
[Writing is like fishing]. You don't bow because you made the fish. That's the difference. If you know that, then you bow for your labor.You crafted, you worked, you put in those hours so that you could catch that fish. But you didn't make that fish. You just caught the fish. That will help you stay humble and bow for the right reason and be very lucid about the work you do.
I mean the reason that I started writing close to home, "Santa Fe," et cetera, was a kind of looking back on past events. I don't know, it's just some of the dark spaces I've been. And it feels like with a music career and whatnot, I've been able to crawl out of those places. So it's interesting to look back on them and try to hold on to the feeling of what you went through.
Get yourself in that intense state of being next to madness. Keep yourself in, not necessarily a frenzied state, but in a state of great intensity. The kind of state you would be in before going to bed with your partner. That heightened state when you're in a carnal embrace: time stops and nothing else matters. You should always write with an erection. Even if you're a woman.
I think a lot of times photo sessions is just a test, maybe, for models. Sometimes it's for money. I'm going to shoot a girl in a couple weeks in Italy who has been writing me for a couple years. She sends photos all the time and it's kind of like a game. A lot of times people write and then they just want to see if I'm interested. If I say I am, I never hear from them again.
Somebody realized, hey, students are printing dummy ads and dummy news stories, why don't they really print something. So there was the Shortridge Daily Echo, and a hell of a lot of writers have come out of Shortridge on that account. The head writer of the I Love Lucy show, Madelyn Pugh, was a schoolmate of mine. Dan Wakefield. Writing was a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
I think the underlying purpose is expression. It's not about technique, it's not about hitting the right note, writing the perfect prose, having the perfect brushstroke. It's about expression of oneself, the things around you, and the emotions. I think expression is the one word that I would use, whether it's for sorrow, tragedy, joy, or even the need to express and be heard.
The best advice I can give on this is, once it's done, to put it away until you can read it with new eyes. Finish the short story, print it out, then put it in a drawer and write other things. When you're ready, pick it up and read it, as if you've never read it before. If there are things you aren't satisfied with as a reader, go in and fix them as a writer: that's revision.
I tend to write about people. I look at things from the bottom up and from the perspective of outsiders. A part of me just identifies with them. It's my messed up internal nature that I always feel like an outsider. It's just my nature. At film festivals, I was an outsider for sure, but I always felt like one as well. I have that feeling at parties, too. I don't belong there.
The magic of comics is that there are three people involved in any comic: There is whoever is writing it, and whoever is drawing it, and then there's whoever is reading it, because the really important things in comics are occurring in the panel gutters, they're occurring between panels as the person reading the comics is moving you through, is creating a film in their heads.
I have learned as much about writing about my people by listening to blues and jazz and spirituals as I have from reading novels. The understatements in the tenor saxophone of Lester Young, the crystal, haunting, forever searching sounds of John Coltrane, and the softness and violence of Count Basie's big band - all have fired my imagination as much as anything in literature.
People think once you get famous and rich you move out of the public sphere and you have nothing left to write about. I've heard that - Bruce Springsteen was this real street boy, now he's got this big house. How does that compute? If you don't look at the material side of someone's life, if you look at more the emotional side, there's always a wealth of stuff to write about.
Over the past decade I have watched many friends go through graduate school and write dissertations. Through that process, I have seen how they are guided by mentors to understand particular norms within their disciplines and to learn about what they can and cannot, should and should not say, and which ideas can go together and which cannot. I never went through this process.
I look at the great poets of the Soviet Union, like Anna Akhmatova, who endured far worse then anything we've seen or hopefully that we will ever see. If they could keep writing and keep a voice alive, keep people hopeful through their poetry, then I would be ashamed to stop and to give in. It would be really self-indulgent, unacceptable, and inexcusable to walk away from it.
There's that lovely thing for the first month or two of writing a new book: OK, I don't know what that character's going to do, but we'll find out later. After about three or four months you come to that bit where you've got to put some plot in before it's too late, and you have to go back and start inserting plot, and, ooh, I've left out the literature, OK, lets put some in.
There's always stuff to write about. So it's very gratifying on a lot of levels. This is stuff I got asked over and over again, or heard about. People would ask me about it, but they kind of knew the answer. It would be this ongoing question: "Your fans are wondering, now that you're married, are you still going to be able to write songs?" I'm serious! I would get asked that!
I also have just my own limits about stuff. I'm not interested in writing graphically about sexual assault for example. I feel like the stuff that I'm fascinated by is the stuff that's part of the public imagination of what horror is. The bleakness is a different issue. I think that just stems from my personality. I wish that I offered a little more glimmer of hope sometimes.
They [academy writing programs] have no concept that the world has changed, that publishing has changed, that filmmaking has changed, and if you're not constantly looking at your education model and adjusting for the change, you'll find yourself teaching antiquity. Like all of these programs that won't accept students who are writing genre fiction - what an institutional ego!
I was sixteen, I became a working guitar player gigging in LA, mostly in top 40 bands, then touring. I learned to take songs apart, down to their bones. Songwriters would hire me to produce their demos, which lead me to become a songwriter. The relationship and power music has to TV and film attracted me to composing [and] I learned to write for instruments other than guitar.
The writer learns to write, in the last resort, only by writing. He must get words onto paper even if he is dissatisfied with them. A young writer must cross many psychological barriers to acquire confidence in his capacity to produce good work-especially his first full-length book-and he cannot do this by staring at a piece of blank paper, searching for the perfect sentence.
Novels are forged in passion, demand fidelity and commitment, often drive you to boredom or rage, sleep with you at night. They are the long haul. They are marriage. Stories, on the other hand, you can lose yourself in for a few weeks and then wrap up, or grow tired of and abandon and (maybe) return to later. They can cuddle you sweetly, or make you get on your knees and beg.
Writing is so... I don't know, it's such a practice, and I feel very unpracticed in it, because I'm not doing it every day. And I really need to do it every day. In other words, you spend all this time writing a movie, and then you stop, and then you're shooting the movie, and then you're cutting, and a year and a half goes by, because in the editing room, you're not writing.
There are a lot of people out there who will write books, in which everything turns out nicely and the bad guys lose, the good guys win, the boy gets the girl and they live happily ever after. There's a million books like that and if that's the comfort you're looking for, you should read those books and not my books because that's not the kind of book that I am interested in.
The Society of North American Magic Realists welcomes its newest, most dazzling member, Louis Maistros. His debut novel is a thing of wonder, unlike anything in our literature. It startles. It stuns. It stupefies. No novel since CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES has done such justice to New Orleans. If Franz Kafka had been able to write like Peter Straub, this might have been the result.
(Talks about Lucky You) "The song was about a girl who didn't fit in and she didn't care and she was different than everyone else. I think there's a long chorus of me singing "Do do do do do do do do do do". It's very young and I look back and it's kind of interesting to hear those kind of storylines and the lyrics that I used to write compared to the lyrics that I write now.
When I write something simple I'm always really proud of it. When you write something that simple with that much air in it and the whole premise behind it is something pretty obvious - that everybody wants to be happy and free - the song is sort of an exercise in not forgetting that's what you really want and what you really need. We can get caught up in a lot of other stuff.
All archaeologists in Israel and Palestine make use of the New Testament Gospels. They do this because the Gospels exhibit verisimilitude. In short, the Gospels help archaeologists know where to dig and they help archaeologists understand what they unearth. The 2nd-century Gospels and Gospel-like writings rarely exhibit verisimilitude, so archaeologists rarely appeal to them.
When people reflexively write checks to institutions that have billions of dollars in the bank, they are essentially committing a moral crime. Your money could do good in this world and you're choosing instead to waste it. People have to do a better job of that. You've got to find places where your money's going to do some good and direct your dollars towards that institution.
There's no such thing as a folk writer. There's no such thing as somebody who's never read a book before suddenly sitting down one day and writing one. You have to learn how to captivate a reader. Right? And I don't mean you have to go to school for it. But if you're - if you pay attention, you can learn it by reading books. And so I feel like I learned a lot by reading books.
The best time to write is when your life is in the toilet. Writing offers an escape from your problems, so if you force yourself to write when you're in the doldrums, it will have the perverse effect of cheering you up. At the very least, it allows you to inflict your pain on your characters, which has the dual effect of giving them more depth while relieving your own tension.
Wine buffs write and talk as though the food and wine will be in your mouth at the same time, that one is there to be poured over the other. This is bullshit. Gustatory enjoyment comes from food and wine and cigars of your liking. So far no one has said that a Monte Cristo is the only cigar to smoke after Armagnac, Romeo and Juliet after Calvados ... but the time may yet come.
What Malcolm X did not know is that back in 1962, a collaborator of Alex Haley, fellow named - a journalist named Alfred Balk had approached the F.B.I. regarding an article that he and Haley were writing together for The Saturday Evening Post, and the F.B.I. had an interest in castigating the Nation of Islam, and isolating it from the mainstream of Negro civil rights activity.