Writing Quotes
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I don't wake up in the morning and say, 'Jeez, I feel great today. I think I'll write a song.' I mean, anything is more interesting to me than writing a song. It's like, 'I think I'd like to write a song... No, I guess I better go feed the cat first.' You know what I mean? It's like pulling teeth. I don't enjoy it a bit.
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In writing I found something I could do at least as well as my peers, if not better.
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I love to direct! I get really jazzed by directing, but directing is not the same kind of personal expression, the same kind of personal intimate expression that writing is. Because when you're directing, you're basically managing, basically getting out of people doing their job, except when you see them going astray.
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I write all the time. The wonderful thing about having a cell phone is that if I get an idea, I knock it out and it's in my phone and I can transfer it to my computer and go into the studio and bring it up.
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Much of writing might be described as mental pregnancy with successive difficult deliveries.
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What I enjoy as entertainment is what I enjoy writing.
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I had thought of writing, actually, and that later on I'd be a novelist.
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When you have somebody writing or acting for you, you have to be free to have them hate you so you can get your ideas across without worrying.
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I began writing a book on love because I felt that the United States is moving away from love.
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Men of quality are in the wrong to undervalue, as they often do, the practise of a fair and quick hand in writing; for it is no immaterial accomplishment.
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I try not to be overly literal. When I'm writing songs, I write down a lot of words, and then I try to simplify it. I like to give people hints or words that make visual pictures for them.
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What I like writing about are people's relationships, not necessarily great big dramatic things but the smaller things in life and how they affect characters and challenge and change the people that they are. I do like a happy ending, so my books have to have a happy ending.
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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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My writing voice is very much like 'Thank You for Smoking.' It's a guy's voice. It's very masculine.
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But compared to writing a novel, where you can be God, I did the Bay of Pigs invasion in six pages once, and there were 50,000 guys with boots that I didn't have to pay, and all those extras; we didn't have to pay them.
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In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn't be mixed. And if they are, the fictional points should be printed in red ink, the facts printed in black ink.
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I'm going to do whatever interests me. Look, writing 'Rabbit Hole' came out of an interest in diversifying my portfolio, frankly.
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I think good creative writing opens up space for people to come into. Let God reach out and touch the human soul. That's not my job. I get to be present and create as much space as I can ... That frees me up just to be creative in the way I want to be.
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Twenty-seven people sang 'Wind Beneath My Wings' before I got around to it. A lot of people saw the movie that I sang it in, Beaches, and what they came away with was that song. They turned to their loved ones and said, 'You know, you are the wind beneath my wings!' The song expressed how they felt in a way a simple 'I love you' would not have.
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Co-writing is a very unnatural feeling. It's like wanting to document a feeling that you have and then trying to get someone else to describe it for you.
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People talk about writing convincing teenagers like it's a really clever thing to do, but it comes incredibly naturally to me. Which, of course, is slightly a worry.
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When you're writing a blog post, you can take solace in knowing that you will immediately know how people will respond to it, and if the criticism is bad, then that's fine because you can work on that and fix it, and if it's good, then that's great because you know what to do in the future. It gets pushed down so quickly.
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It's often said that elephants are the most human of animals - there's something comical about their acquiescence, and tragic also. The long elephant poem - I was trying to write from the point of view of someone who had been seduced by the logic of his punishers and who, in a kind of awful way, could reproduce the very logic that had put him in this predicament in the first place. And maybe, in some kind of minor way, that's something I feel about myself, or maybe about all selves, that they fall in love with the thing that oppresses them.
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I didn't know how story worked. So, when writing the screenplay, people introduced me to the science of it. And I'm grateful. I'll probably use that information for the rest of my career, in terms of writing novels or writing stories. And then, of course, to help me live a better story, a more meaningful story.
