Writing Quotes
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Diana Wynne Jones' excellent book 'The Tough Guide to Fantasyland' is a compendium of the sort of lazy writing that has given fantasy fiction - especially the sub-section that features elves and dwarves and other Tolkienesque elements - a bad name.
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I pretty much always knew I wanted to be a writer. I was writing goofy stories when I was 7 or 8. That was what I call 'wishful-thinking writing.' I grew up in the city and always wanted a horse, but there was no way I was getting a horse. So I wrote all these stories about kids who had horses. It's still fun entering these other worlds.
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You have a strange relationship with calamity when you're a writer: you write about it; as an artist, you objectify and fetishize it. You render life into material, and that's a creepy thing to do.
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It must have been when I was 14 or 15 that I started tentatively writing songs and was able to convey an emotion and a lyric with what I wanted to say.
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Writing is the hardest work in the world. I have been a bricklayer and a truck driver, and I tell you – as if you haven't been told a million times ALREADY – that writing is harder. Lonelier. And nobler and more enriching.
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[Writing] books is really fun because your "voice" is pretty undiluted. There is a very direct connection between yourself and your audience. You will have an editor, but their job is to help you clarify or improve your voice, not change it.
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I suspect that writer's block afflicts mainly people who have some stable and ample source of income outside of writing. So far it hasn't been a problem.
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I work in musical theater because people keep writing quality stories in the genre, and I'm really all about investing in a piece that says something about our current time, that is, a reflection on who we are today.
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Something that really helps when it comes to writing songs is you start to notice how children learn and how we all had to learn in the first place, starting from the ground up. It gives you a new perspective.
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Combine a left-leaning upbringing with a family with direct experience of the Holocaust and someone with aspirations to write and I guess, sooner or later, that person will have a stab at writing something about the Holocaust.
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The novelist must be his own most harsh critic and also his own most loving admirer and about both he must say nothing.
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When I was a boy, my parents were writers and they owned a bookstore, 'The Complete Traveler in New York,' so writing and books have held special places in my heart all my life.
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Does housekeeping interest you at all? I think it really ought to be just as good as writing and I never see where the separation between the too comes in. At least if you must put books on one side and life on the other, each is a poor and bloodless thing; but my theory is that they mix indistinguishable.
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I've been writing full-time since 1978.
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I was writing this really long joke about the smell of poop, and I was like, 'What am I doing with my life?' I started to think about why I was a comedian, and then I came up with a reason for existence, which is: inserting absurdity or stupidity into strangers' lives in order to make the world a better place.
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As an actor, you see a sliver of how the show is made, but to see the actual writing process and the re-writing process and the casting process and art direction and set design - all of this is happening in a very intense period.
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I don't know what'll ever happen if I'm in a healthy relationship. My writing career will go down the tubes.
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It's much like writing a screenplay with someone else and that's how we view it, I think.
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If anybody won life, David Bowie did, at least as a creative entity in the sense of writing yourself into existence and writing yourself out in such a graceful swoop.
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The mere habit of writing, of constantly keeping at it, of never giving up, ultimately teaches you how to write.
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Writing is a workout, just like going for a run!
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Writing has been an important exercise to clarify what I believe, what I see, what I care about, what my deepest values are. The process of converting a jumble of thoughts into coherent sentences makes you ask tougher questions.
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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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I've always wanted to have a book published - it was a dream of mine, but the thought of actually writing a book made me feel really sick.
