Writing Quotes
-
It would have been very easy to drift into writing a non-fiction book so by taking it away from Nottingham I forced myself to imagine much more of it.
-
As one of my creative writing professors once said, there are only seven plots. What makes those plots different is how you handle them, your voice, your style, and your way of thinking. That’s all. People can mimic your style, but they can never achieve your unique point of view.
-
I have a lot of reactions to the outside world that I don't feel like would be appropriate for songs: things I'm not interested in writing about, things I don't want to think about any longer than 15 or 20 seconds.
-
Let me tell you, writing comics is as hard as anything I've ever done - for me, at least. I'm now officially in awe of guys who can crank out multiple books a month and maintain a high level of quality. Comics are completely different than any other medium I've dabbled in.
-
I occasionally play works by contemporary composers and for two reasons. First to discourage the composer from writing any more and secondly to remind myself how much I appreciate Beethoven.
-
To just write one song to then go and play huge festivals all around the world it's exciting and it's never really been the case.
-
What do you want? What are you willing to give up to get it? Writing requires you make sacrifices. Be prepared to work hard to be a writer.
-
Sometimes I leave mayonnaise on the ends of my hair for a few hours while I'm writing; it's a really good moisturizer.
-
I look for ambiguity when I'm writing because life is ambiguous.
-
Joseph Conrad and Heart of Darkness loom huge in my development as a writer. I think I'm always trying to write Heart of Darkness - trying to explode an abstraction in concrete terms, although I am aware that Conrad's story has a bit of baggage that I'd rather avoid in my work.
-
I love writing about black women, but if you go beyond that, we're human beings - and because we're human beings, it's universal for everybody.
-
Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.
-
I studied writing at NYU. I graduated high school in Nashville and then went to the creative writing program, and in the first year, that's when I wrote 'Kids.'
-
Heartbreak was the impetus to me writing poems and music in the first place. Over the years, I had my heart broken so badly that if I didn't find a way to get all the pain out, I was going to lose my mind. I was crazy! Like, wanting to slash tires and smash car windows. Crazy! I was so hurt that I had to write.
-
'Shun security,' I advise aspiring novelists when they complain to me that they are stuck. 'Get disoriented. Maybe your agonizing writing block isn't agonizing enough. Your enemy is comfort.'
-
I cannot say that I write with any social objective. One writes because one loves writing, really.
-
Even at my biggest, I want to be writing for other artists. Even at my peak - the highest I can be as an artist - I always want to be keeping my creative juices flowing, keeping money in the bank, putting my intellectual property out there.
-
My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.
-
I didn't really see a way to make a living on the farm. I always loved writing. I was the guy who won the D.A.R. essay contest and things like that, and it was the era of Watergate, and I decided I would be the next Woodward and Bernstein, and then retire to the farm.
-
I was thinking of writing a little foreword saying that history is, after all, based on people's recollections, which change with time.
-
If it has something of substance and a platform that makes sense, I can share my story. You can get a little more into my life, and I can mesh my singing with things I love to do and writing for others and telling my story in hopes of helping someone. I'm all for it.
-
I'm really just trying... to write what feels true to me. I don't think about a lofty responsibility. I think I'd be paralyzed by that. Like any of my male colleagues, I'm writing the stories that interest me in a way that feels true to me.
-
What he's likely to do is to continue writing and speaking, as he has done to some extent at the Fed, and pursuing his interests in economics, which are very intense, ... He loves working with data and thinking of new ideas about the economy. I suspect we will get some of that, and in some ways, he'll be a little bit freer to speak.
-
For me, 'risky' is revealing what really happened in my life through music. Risky is writing confessional songs and telling the true story about a person with enough details so everyone knows who that person is.
