Writing Quotes
-
I've grown more and more appreciative of good writing, and I now really hope I can become a better and better writer.
-
I started off doing fiction in 1993. It didn't occur to me to do nonfiction because it wasn't a thing yet. So I was bumbling around, writing short stories, and then I took a nonfiction workshop, and I realized that this was what I was supposed to do.
-
Writing and playing songs is something that I've loved doing since the day I started. It's never been a chore; it's always a hobby. To be able to do that from day to day makes me believe I'm a very lucky person.
-
You have to go where the good writing is.
-
Careful writing is important for many reasons, not least that intelligent but hurried reporters will trust the presser, resulting in a cascade of secondary damage.
-
People love talking about writers as storytellers, but I hate being called that: it suggests I got it from my grandmother or something, when my writing really comes out of silence. If a storyteller came up to me, I'd run away.
-
I'm not an emotional person; I keep it in, and I wouldn't know how to get it out if it weren't for acting and writing.
-
I started writing music with my cousin at, like, 16 and traveled with a '70s band.
-
When I get bored, I'll zone out, and I'll just sit in front of my computer and start writing any random song that comes to mind.
-
Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.
-
I'm more rooted in new plays and new writing.
-
If I could go back in time and tell my younger self that eventually that I'd become very successful writing Dune books after Frank Herbert's death, I would have laughed myself silly, I think, at how strange that prospect would be.
-
I have fun writing. I don't make it a chore. I don't have to struggle with it.
-
Whether I'm writing for myself or someone else, I'll always write a song that I would feel comfortable singing.
-
Frankly I'm fairly boring or fairly busy. Between writing and family, I have little time for anything else.
-
I guess I don't really know any other way to do it, it just feels like the natural way to do things for me. Like - if I'm writing a song - it has to have some sort of value. Or it only has some kind of value to me, if it's something really personal. It has to mean something to me. I guess it is a little uncomfortable, or it's a little embarrassing sometimes, to know that stuff that honest is out there. But, when I hand off the thing, when it's totally done and mastered and sent, I kinda feel like it doesn't belong to me anymore.
-
Fiction writing, and the reading of it, and book buying, have always been the activities of a tiny minority of people, even in the most-literate societies.
-
I changed my writing style deliberately. My first two novels were written in a very self-consciously literary way. After I embraced gay subject matter, which was then new, I didn't want to stand in its way. I wanted to make the style as transparent as possible so I could get on with it and tell the story, which was inherently interesting.
-
The problem as you get older is, from my perspective, after a certain amount of songs, you tend to start writing something and then you stop and say, 'Wait, I think I've written that before.'
-
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.
-
In prose, you have a lot more room for digression, for very meaty kinds of dialogues. In graphic novels, you're writing haiku-length dialogue. Your job is to be efficient, to get out of the way of the art.
-
Writing is a lonely way of life. You shut yourself up in your study and work and work.
-
I used to be something of an obsessive when it came to research. When I first began writing the Thorne novels, I would drive to a set of traffic lights in the early hours of the morning to make sure you could turn left. I thought it was important to get even the most trivial details right.
-
It's kind of always been a secret fantasy of mine, the idea of writing a song and then not having to be the face of it.
