Writing Quotes
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When you write, it's just a much more crystalline, compressed version of the voice you think with - though not the one you speak with. I think your writing voice is your laser-guided missile. It's the poetry part of you.
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The story was such that I couldn't make a graceful ending and then make a graceful new beginning. I could have, but I didn't want to. So, it isn't the most graceful way of writing a story. This new story is, I think, is pretty good stuff. I'm pleased with it anyway.
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For me, writing a song, I sit down and the process doesn't really involve me thinking about the demographic of people I'm trying to hit or who I want to be able to relate to the song or what genre of music it falls under.
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I believe that reading widely is the best preparation for writing.
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I started writing half a paragraph of a mystery novel, half a paragraph there, and they were terrible.
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You sit at your computer for hours, then slave away at your job that you may or may not like. You don't know how to explain to them that the time when you feel alive or present is when you are writing.
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You need to get outside of your comfort zone to write songs that are interesting, songs that are compelling, songs that are different from what other people are writing.
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I stopped writing fiction the moment I started writing songs, and I miss it.
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When I was younger, I avoided exercise or anything strenuous. I didn't even enjoy walking. As I got older, I spent so much time marking books or sitting at a desk writing that there was no room for exercise - not that I would have bothered anyway.
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If it's a drama or comedy, it doesn't matter to me. I just want to like the writing.
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With sitcom writing, you're trying to write stories.
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I don't think many of us launched ourselves into the world of writing books fully formed.
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I consider writing practice a true Zen practice because it all comes back at you. You can't fool anyone because it's on the page.
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Sometimes writing a novel is not unlike having a baby. You'd have to ask a female novelist to compare the pain.
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I've yet to use a cellphone, and I've never tweeted or entered Facebook. I try not to go online till my day's writing is finished, and I moved from Manhattan to rural Japan in part so I could more easily survive for long stretches entirely on foot, and every trip to the movies would be an event.
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Reduce your plan to writing. The moment you complete this, you will have definitely given concrete form to the intangible desire.
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It takes me a long time to write, and I trust myself, so I write very sparsely, so when I do, I know it's good, you know what I mean? Rather than writing a whole bunch and having to sort out what's good and what's not.
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So much of writing isn't the fun parts like we get to discuss. It is sitting there putting the words down.
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I can't read novels while I'm writing a novel, because somebody's voice creeps in.
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Poetry is the most intimate of all writing. I want to speak first from me to myself and then from me to you.
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I took a writing class in college, liked it, and my first year out of school I couldn't get a job, so I wrote a play.
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In America there's a tendency to write the same book over and over because that's what sells. So in a way, my success in America has come at the expense of what I do. I haven't sold out, and I haven't taken the popular road to writing a best-selling book. I've really bucked the system. So it was necessary for me not to go and find the easy fans, the ones who want something digestible and fast with a happy ending that they can read over and over again no matter how many different books it is. I had to find fans who really wanted to think. Worldwide they all have that in common.
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I enjoy writing. Publishing... not so much. I've been lucky to work with some very talented people in the publishing world, and the print industry has allowed me to write full time.
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People often lump radio and television together because they are both broadcast mediums. But radio, anyway, and the radio I do for NPR, is much closer to writing than it is to television.
