Writing Quotes
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In all honesty, I've written movies that have been made, and the process has not been as satisfying as writing for television.
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Raymond Roussel said that after his first book he expected that the next morning there would be a kind of aura around his person and that everyone in the street would be able to see that he had written a book. This is the obscure desire harboured by everyone who writes. It is true that the first text one writes is neither written for others, nor because one is what one is: one writes to become other than what one is. One tries to modify one's way of being through the act of writing.
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Writing is a strange and solitary activity. There are dispiriting times when you start working on the first few pages of a novel. Every day, you have the feeling you are on the wrong track. This creates a strong urge to go back and follow a different path. It is important not to give in to this urge but to keep going.
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I have a great many shortcomings, but writing for something on time has never bothered me.
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Seem to be telling this, but really telling that. Three-dimensional writing, like three-dimensional chess. Nabokov was the other master of that. You could learn something from Nabokov on every page he ever wrote.
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In Algeria, I had begun to get into literature and philosophy. I dreamed of writing-and already models were instructing the dream, a certain language governed it.
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I like to do the research of history and the creativity of writing fiction. I am creating this thing which I think is twice as difficult as writing either history or fiction.
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When I was eight, my mum found me humming to myself and scribbling on a scrap of paper. When she asked me what I was doing, I got shy. I was writing a Christmas song, and I had never shared my music with anyone before. Reluctantly, I sang it for her... and she loved it. Of course she did - she's my mum.
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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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I was always into pop music, Destiny's Child, songs with catchy music. Even when I was writing when I was younger, it wasn't all about expressing myself; it was just about making fun music.
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I never really tell anyone what I'm writing beforehand because I usually don't know what it will be.
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For me, writing stories is one way of feeling connected to the universe and God.
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The only joy I had was writing what was. That book was. It no longer amuses me to be all the things I was when I wrote that. But it is my story as I was then.
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I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.
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I started writing screenplays myself and eventually directing.
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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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I don't like to read contemporary fiction while writing - I need a sense of isolation, a kind of silence, and I don't want a jumble of other people's voices or visions getting in my way. Nineteenth-century voices don't create static in that silence.
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People have said to me, 'You can't write songs. You can't play an instrument.' But I've got 10 gold records.
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They said I would never write this book. Well, f**k ’em – ’cos here it is. All I have to do now is remember something... Bollocks. I can’t remember anything.
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I think my writing was certainly shaped from having lived in a place like Niverville as well as by the family that I came from, the religion that I had, that type of thing.
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Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meagre.
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There's still a strange moment with every book when I move from the position of writer to the position of reader and I suddenly see my words with the eyes of the cold public. It gives me a terrible sense of exposure, as if I'd gotten sunburned.
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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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Writing is one of those jobs that everyone has an opinion on. I don't think this is a bad thing.
