Writing Quotes
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I was always writing. I've always been attracted to words and stories, communication.
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I sometimes think that, since I started writing biographies, I've had more of a life in books than I have had in my real life.
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They're mostly done before we went into the studio, although I do like writing in the studio.
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By the time I sat down to write 'Family Pictures,' I hadn't written anything in almost two years, and writing, I have discovered, is a muscle: if it isn't exercised, it will atrophy.
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In 2008, I was more just thinking about using the touchscreen for writing the songs. From there I started thinking about how I visualised music.
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I always really loved Russian literature, and I think Tolstoy's writing is full of a sense of melancholy and humanity, so it seems really modern.
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Here's the truth you have to wrestle with: the reason that art (writing, engaging, leading, all of it) is valuable is precisely why I can't tell you how to do it. If there were a map, there'd be no art, because art is the act of navigating without a map. Don't you hate that? I love that there's no map.
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Whether it's writing songs, being on stage, being interviewed, meeting fans - I just try to be myself, which is kind of exhausting because it almost feels like it never shuts off.
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Critics can say what they like about the films, but very often, there's a certain expectation of documentaries that they're supposed to be like PowerPoint presentations. I see documentaries as movies. So when I see some critics writing that we could have done without the recreations altogether - well, perhaps.
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I'm conscious of a series of circles working its way through my life. And at this particular moment I have come round to the beginning of my writing cycle. It begins with poetry. There's hardly a day that goes past on which I don't write poetry.
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I think it's more about trying to just focus exclusively on writing music and making that a viable, sustainable lifestyle. It's difficult because it forces you to really get creative.
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If you're writing an opinion piece, it's your job to write your opinion. If, on the other hand, you wrote a novel, as Virginia Woolf tells us, it would be inappropriate if you let your novel be influenced by your political opinions.
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I think a construction project for me is like writing a novel. I can't do the project unless I can envision sort of the whole structure and see what the end result might be.
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When I'm drawing, I only do that at home, really, at my drawing table. But writing I could do in other places. So I've written in airports, in hotels, different places.
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Writing is not a great profession as a lot of writers proclaim. I write because this is something I can do. Another thing—very often I think a lot of writers write because they have failed to do other things. How many writers can’t drive? A lot. They’re not practical. They are not capable in everyday life.
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The strangest thing that human speech and human writing can do is create a metaphor. That is an amazing leap, is it not?
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Among all kinds of Writing, there is none in which Authors are more apt to miscarry than in Works of Humour, as there is none in which they are more ambitious to excel.
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I remember the excruciating school task of writing a three-page term paper. But, oh, that feeling when I was done! I think I drive myself for that feeling of accomplishment.
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I'm sorry that our country and the people do not consider the arts as vital to our well-being as, say, medicine. Suffering is unnecessary. It doesn't make you a better artist; it only makes you a hungry one. However, to me the acquisition of the craft of writing was worth any amount of suffering.
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Writing is manual labor of the mind - like laying pipe.
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I find writing a book a slow, intricate process, a kind of obstacle course punctuated with great rewards. But research is always thrilling, and I tend to incorporate newfound material up to the very last minute.
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The one affectation I have forced on the publisher... are my apostrophe-free ellisions. Because I write my scripts to read myself, I dont spell 'don't' with an apostrophe. I spell it 'dont'. We all know the word and it seems foolish to put in an extraneous apostrophe. Punctuation marks are devices we use to make the meaning of sentences clear. There is nothing confusing about a word like 'dont' printed without an apostrophe to indicate an omitted letter.
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As an observer, I'm analysing my reactions, I guess, and my thinking; but about the process of writing... I am not very talented at talking about what I do as a writer.
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There are two different ways of writing a novel. The first I call the traditional father way, when the novelist slightly situates himself or herself above the text and knows what each and every character is going to do. It's a bit like engineering. I've never felt close to that tradition. I like the second way, which relies a bit more on intuition.
