Writing Quotes
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Ideas may drift into other minds, but they do not drift my way. I have to go and fetch them. I know no work manual or mental to equal the appalling heart-breaking anguish of fetching an idea from nowhere.
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What was once Sinclair Lewis is buried in no ground. Even in life he was fully alive only in his writing. He lives in public libraries from Maine to California, in worn copies in the bookshelves of women from small towns who, in their girlhood, imagined themselves as Carol Kennicotts, and of medical men who, as youths, were inspired by Martin Arrowsmith.
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The way I write, I work on a song, and I don’t really force myself to finish it. I finish it when I feel like finishing it. I’ve got dozens of songs going at once. That’s the way I preserve my happiness in writing: by doing it because I want to do it, not because I’m trying to finish a job.
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If your way of life is writing, then everything that happens becomes a sentence.
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Everything starts with writing. And then to support your vision, your ideas, your philosophy, your jokes, whatever, you've gotta perform them and/or direct them, or sometimes just produce them.
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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.
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In the world of book writing, an author really gets to have control over what he or she writes, which is why it is very satisfying. With the help of a great compatible editor, you really have something in the end you can call your own.
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In the past, I'd been sort of a fan of writing a coat hanger of a script, and something I could hang ideas off of.
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Writing songs, that's what gets me going. Not the drugs or the sex or the rock'n'roll behaviour, it's the music.
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When I'm creating characters, I definitely think of theme songs. Writing for me is very visual, so I sometimes think of it in terms of a movie with a soundtrack, and try to transfer that to words.
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I think the musicians I play with solo do a certain thing that the musicians we play with with the Indigo Girls don't do. It's just a different thing. And it sort of steers my writing in some ways.
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I can't remember why or how I started writing, but I think it was always a way of making sense of the world.
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I prefer writing in the mornings, so to that extent I have a routine. I do reading and other things in the afternoon.
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I don't think people come to television for spectacle. And I don't really have a lot of fun writing spectacle for television, I'll do that in features.
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Writing at the 'American Spectator' in the 1990s, we threw everything we thought would stick at President Clinton.
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Fiction writing was in my blood from a very young age, but I never considered writing as a real career. I thought you had to have some literary pedigree to be a successful author, the son of Hemingway or Fitzgerald.
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I had never taken creative writing classes. Hadn't even considered it.
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It's hard to write music for specific things, because I'm always writing just to write.
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People talk about the pain of writing, but very few people talk about the pleasure and satisfaction.
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Not only are Christians writing about Jesus, but also Communists, Jews, atheists and agnostics are taking up their pens to paint a portrait of Jesus.
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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 don't really believe in a creative-writing major as an undergraduate. It's a bad idea, terrible. I've met creative-writing majors from other places and they don't know a goddamn thing. They're the worst students. They just think they're good because they could pass.
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Francie was ten years old when she first found an outlet in writing. What she wrote was of little consequence. What was important was that the attempt to write stories kept her straight on the dividing line between truth and fiction. If she had not found this outlet in writing, she might have grown up to be a tremendous liar.
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When I'm writing, I need to amplify my thoughts and feelings on just a conversation that I might have had with somebody - somebody close to me. It's often the case that the people closest to me are the people on my mind the most.
