Writing Quotes
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There is a gap in my work from '84 to 2002, 18 years where I stopped writing. I was working at fiction and other things and starting a school and getting married and starting a family, but I wasn't writing poetry for the better part of 15 years.
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Foreshadowings of the principles and even of the language of [the infinitesimal] calculus can be found in the writings of Napier, Kepler, Cavalieri, Pascal, Fermat, Wallis, and Barrow. It was Newton's good luck to come at a time when everything was ripe for the discovery, and his ability enabled him to construct almost at once a complete calculus.
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Favorite subject? I would have to say creative writing.
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Things we write down are the fragments shored against our ruins. They outlast us, these scraps of words on paper. Like the detritus from the tsunami washing up on the other side of the ocean, writing is what can be salvaged.
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As a high-school drop-out, I knew I wanted to write, but I wasn't overly confident that I was going to be writing anything serious. I was happy enough with the idea that I could be a penny-a-word guy and survive.
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When I was writing 'The Luminaries,' I read a lot of crime novels because I wanted to figure out which ones made me go, 'Ah! I didn't know that was coming!'
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I often think I am a better person because I lived for many years of my life with a flashlight. I have developed skills I did not think were possible - bathing with a cup of water by candlelight, for instance, and writing a story with a headlamp on.
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I don't spend as much time drawing as I do writing and reading. That's the really work-intensive part. And by the time I have enough material, it's often way past due time to put the comic up, and I'm already behind schedule, and I have to kind of rush it.
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I never know, when I start writing a story, what's going to happen, or how it will all get sorted out.
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I sort of kept my hand in writing and went to work for the Sierra Club in '52, walked the plank there in '69, founded Friends of the Earth and the League of Conservation Voters after that.
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I think there is a rage against women. I've come to see that now although at the time I did not notice it. I was preoccupied with my teaching and my writing.
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I had written the script a few years earlier for Paramount, then later got hired with Sam [Fuller] to write an entirely new script that he was going to direct. And that was one of the great thrills of my professional life.
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Good writing is good writing, but that doesn't mean you can't orchestrate it or tweak it.
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I'm very keenly aware that there aren't very many women writing literary fiction in Ireland and so that gives me a sense that what I say matters, in some small way.
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When I first started working at MIT, back in the '80s, our writing department had a joint cocktail party with the Harvard writing department. It was kind of oil-and-water.
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Domesticity is the enemy of art. I don't know if that's true. You can write good happy songs. So, I don't think it's necessarily happiness. But I think self-satisfaction is maybe the enemy. It's kind of better to think, "Tomorrow night I'm gonna sing it better." There is this forward effort. It feels to me right, it feels human.
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I think the close work I do as a translator pays off in my writing - I'm always searching for multiple ways to say things.
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Writing is a tribute to solitude. It is choosing introversion over extroversion, lonely hours/days/weeks/years over fun and sociability.
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Cooking is the best way to unwind at the end of a long writing day. There's something mindless and hands-on about cooking, which makes it feel like the very opposite of writing, which is heady but inactive.
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Writing in a strict form can surprise you.
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Yes, writing is essential to me. It's my way of living in the world.
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I enjoyed needling the press. If I didn't enjoy it, I wouldn't have done it. Writers have rarely played, so as a coach, you have antagonistic feelings about some guy writing up the story of the game who's never even attempted to play it.
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The smartest people in Washington are the political reporters. They write about their inferiors.
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I absolutely love writing and sharing my enthusiasm with students, and because of 'Hattie Big Sky,' Montana holds a special place in my heart.
