Writing Quotes
-
My dad, who plays guitar and piano and was in cover bands, along with my older brother, Matt, taught me guitar and stuff. I started writing acoustic songs and playing by myself in 7th grade.
-
I get invited to do panels with other Brooklyn writers to discuss what it's like to be a writer in Brooklyn. I expect it's like writing in Manhattan, but there aren't as many tourists walking very slowly in front of you when you step out for coffee. It's like writing in Paris, but there are fewer people speaking French.
Colson Whitehead
-
I work daily, but not always on comics. I'm doing quite a bit of writing now, and I teach as well.
-
Maybe I would have become an actor. I was a very outgoing kid, but being in the hospital - being outside of social action for so long - turned me into an observer. Actually, right after I got out of the hospital, I did start writing a novel, but the book was so transparently about me that I stopped.
-
Have a working spouse, because you won't earn a living from writing - not at first, if ever. My wife worked for years to support us.
-
Some of my favorite poets had a tremendous sense of whimsy, so it's a writing style I guess I admire.
-
...there was practically one handwriting common to the whole school when it came to writing lines. It resembled the movements of a fly that had fallen into an ink-pot, and subsequently taken a little brisk exercise on a sheet of foolscap by way of restoring the circulation.
-
My biggest problem about writing is whenever I write piano pieces, because I then have to learn to play them, which is sometimes not so easy.
-
Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.
-
General writing about science, even if we do it badly, helps us to see our work in perspective and broadens our vision.
-
Definitely for writing, what inspires me is poetry, which I have next to me all the time because I think they're doing what I'm doing, but much harder, more condensed. It's the same job, but they're more talented. All of them. So I just steal openly from them.
-
Elegance of language may not be in the power of all of us; but simplicity and straight forwardness are. Write much as you would speak; speak as you think. If with your inferior, speak no coarser than usual; if with your superiors, no finer.
-
I rarely listen to music while writing. I wish I could, but it distracts me.
-
In the future, I'd like to continue being honest with myself and admit when I'd be better off asking someone else to illustrate my writing.
-
I grew up loving music and being super involved in church choir and school musicals and such, but when I started writing is when I fell in love with the idea of doing it for the rest of my life.
-
I wish my prose to be transparentĀI don't want the reader to stumble over me; I want him to look through what I'm saying to what I'm describing. I don't want him ever to say, Oh, goodness, how nicely written this is. That would be a failure.
-
I would sit in my room and become hysterical about the wild incredible story I was writing. And I thought I was writing realism. It never occurred to me that I was writing absurdity. Realism and absurdity are so similar in the lives of American blacks one cannot tell the difference.
-
I had thought of writing, actually, and that later on I'd be a novelist.
-
Shakespeare was a man who wrote poetry. I'm a man who writes poetry. Why not compare yourself to the best?
-
Around age 18, I decided to start writing my own stuff. I wrote some bad short films and shot them. I tried to make them better and better. I slowly learned how to make movies, and I think I'm still learning.
-
Writing as a woman presents enormous problems but I have attempted it several times and haven't had many complaints.
-
I think, in writing a memoir, you kind of give order to your life.
-
Anthropological fieldwork is so much like writing a novel. Granted, you don't have the physical disruption and disorientation, but writing a novel is like entering a new culture. You don't know what the hell is going on. And every day you feel like you have nothing, you're going nowhere. Or you feel that first it's going somewhere, but then you get into that horrible middle part.
-
I like hearing other writers just about the way they approach writing. It gives me energy for my own work. It's weird; I'm always taking notes about fiction when I'm listening to people talk about craft.
