Writing Quotes
-
If success in selling is my primary interest, I am not primarily a writer, but a salesperson. If I teach success in selling as the writer's primary objective, I am not teaching writing; I'm teaching, or pretending to teach, the production and marketing of a commodity.
-
It's usually a big kind of vent of frustration or anger or sadness that puts me in the right frame of mind to write. It's such a cliche to say that artists write when they're down, but it's true for me. It's a relief to get out what's eating away at my heart or my soul or my head.
-
Early on, it's good to develop the ability to write. Learning to write is a useful exercise, even if what you're writing about is not that relevant.
-
For me, writing never gets easier. It's always hard work. It doesn't matter how many words you wrote the day before, or how many novels you've completed in the last decade: every day you start fresh again with that same blank page, or that same blank screen.
-
In order to actually have a touchscreen in front of me and somehow still be connected to nature, I needed to be able to incorporate natural elements into the song structures. Because that's always been my song-writing accompaniment: nature.
-
I go through cycles with my writing. I have cycles where I'm up all night and lose track of time, and then I go for months without a thing to write about. My song 'So Good, So Right' came to me while I was washing dishes after a dinner party.
-
It's easier to revise lousy writing than to revise a blank sheet of paper.
-
Despite all the cynical things writers have said about writing for money, the truth is we write for love. That is why it is so easy to exploit us.
-
The reason that I keep writing is that all my most powerful messages about the fates of wild places that I care about need to have words as well as images.
-
If you want to say you got to take a woman out to a fancy restaurant, I write songs about hey I'm not taking you to a fancy restaurant, I wanna take you to McDonald's.
-
Writing for TV made way more sense than writing for magazines. And by sense, I mean money.
-
I loved 'Everybody Loves Raymond' because I like Ray and I thought it was beautifully cast, I thought it was great writing. I thought Patricia Heaton was wonderful.
-
I think, when I'm 73, I'm going to be getting softer, writing Hallmark cards, losing my teeth.
-
I was extraordinarily lucky. I wrote a book because I wanted to see if I could write a mystery. Someone nagged me into sending it to a contest, which it won, after which I was offered a two-book contract, thus requiring the writing of a second book.
-
I saw that something changed in terms of the way I approach writing. I don't know. Before, everything was just sort of pieced together; and more and more nowadays I'll have complete songs - chords, lyrics, a melody - and we'll apply to those songs what we feel is required. That has happened much more on Humbug album than on any of the others.
-
I don't investigate things by writing about them, but let them build up inside of me.
-
I tell young people who ask me about a future in writing not to go into it unless they get married to someone rich.
-
From a writing point of view, you now have teams of screenwriters working with a director. What's lost in the process is the power of that one heart, brain, gut and soul that makes something an original piece of writing.
-
I have a lot of fun writing for artists, but I'm learning to apply that fun to myself.
-
I don't have to worry about writing jokes. I just tell stories about things that have happened to me. As long as I'm alive and I'm living and I'm experiencing different things every day, the show will always change.
-
One thing I always did in my career was writing. I always was writing. I was trying to create things. For myself, for other people.
-
I worked as an actor for many years. Then I segued to some non-fiction writing.
-
Expressing political opinion can be a powerful way to establish a character's voice when writing fiction.
-
For example, many colleges in their writing programs teach some of my work.
