Michael Nyman Quotes
There's always a question of duration, there's a question of who the orchestra is. No one is free to write what you want - you collaborate on a film score, and one of the good things is that someone else's work is motivating you.
Michael Nyman
Quotes to Explore
Writing is like a contact sport, like football. You can get hurt, but you enjoy it.
Irwin Shaw
Revision is the heart of writing. Every page I do is done over seven or eight times.
Patricia Reilly Giff
I am a great procrastinator. When the writing is going really well, the laundry piles up.
Dana Spiotta
Originality is not seen in single words or even in sentences. Originality is the sum total of a man's thinking or his writing.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Writing is like a 'lust,' or like 'scratching when you itch.' Writing comes as a result of a very strong impulse, and when it does come, I, for one, must get it out.
C. S. Lewis
Medicine was certainly intended to be a career. I wanted to become a psychiatrist, an adolescent ambition which, of course, is fulfilled by many psychiatrists. The doctor/psychiatrist figures in my writing are alter egos of a kind, what I would have been had I not become a writer - a personal fantasy that I've fed into my fiction.
J. G. Ballard
There are, first of all, two kinds of authors: those who write for the subject’s sake, and those who write for writing’s sake. The first kind have had thoughts or experiences which seem to them worth communicating, while the second kind need money and consequently write for money.
Arthur Schopenhauer
I tend to push whatever is looking over my shoulder away when I am writing. It's once the box of books arrive that I say I'm going to be pilloried for this or that. But then you realize it's done, and there is nothing I can do. I'm proud of the book.
David Bergen
For me, most writing consists of siphoning out useless pre-story matter, cutting and cutting and cutting, what seems to be endless rewriting, and what is entailed in all that is patience, and waiting, and false starts, and dead ends, and really, in a way, nerve.
Deborah Eisenberg
I never read detective novels. I started out in graduate school writing a more serious book. Right around that time I read 'The Day of the Jackal' and 'The Exorcist'. I hadn't read a lot of commercial fiction, and I liked them.
James Patterson
Stephen King once told me he liked my writing. And that was great.
Nelson DeMille
I find it hard to write with writers sometimes because of their way of writing. Some are heavily focused on structure, but I have more of a 'Let's go with it' mindset. I like to be creative, and when I hear something that inspires me, I'll come up with a melody, a lyric to that melody, and take it from there. I try to keep it open.
Jess Glynne
My beloved husband goes through radiation, and a book of sonnets is my passionate response. And then after he dies, I write another book of poems as a farewell. The two keywords here are passion and joy. I simply have a passion for writing, and I do it with joy.
Jane Yolen
What has praise and fame to do with poetry? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? So that all this chatter and praise, and blame and meeting people who admired one and meeting people who did not admire one was as ill suited as could be to the thing itself- a voice answering a voice.
Virginia Woolf
If you think back to the fight over drones, when I was proud to be standing shoulder to shoulder with Rand Paul filibustering for 13 hours, that was viewed as a fringe issue, as a quixotic issue, and yet millions of Americans engaged, spoke up, got online.
Ted Cruz
It is the business of thought to define things, to find the boundaries; thought, indeed, is a ceaseless process of definition. It is the business of Art to give things shape.
Vance Palmer
I could never have known so well how paltry men are, and how little they care for really high aims, if I had not tested them by my scientific researches. Thus I saw that most men only care for science so far as they get a living by it, and that they worship even error when it affords them a subsistence.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
There's always a question of duration, there's a question of who the orchestra is. No one is free to write what you want - you collaborate on a film score, and one of the good things is that someone else's work is motivating you.
Michael Nyman
