Writing Quotes
-
There are so many forms of love. Spending time with friends, love stories. I enjoy showing my love by baking a cake for somebody and writing his or her name on it, and seeing his or her reaction. I love to offer flowers, too!
-
My routine is to create activities for myself unrelated to writing that allow little time for writing. This means that when I do get the chance to write, it is like a stolen luxury, something clandestine and almost forbidden.
-
For me, writing is like being taken on a walk by a footnote: It's amazing where you end up.
-
The first writing of the human being was drawing, not writing.
-
When I was younger I used to get my best writing done at night, but now it has to be during the day. I usually finish work at half past seven, then go back to the house to open a bottle of wine, have dinner, and then read or watch television.
-
I went to work in 1962, and by '64 I was writing all the time, every night and every weekend. It didn't occur to me that, having read nothing and knowing nothing, I was in no position to write a book.
-
The primary thing I should do, apart from being a good husband, brother, son, and friend, is to be a citizen activist. But I'm afraid it takes away from the writing. Not that anything depends on whether I put an essay in 'The Nation' or not. But you want to participate.
-
Stephen King's 'On Writing' is probably the most useful writing book I've ever read.
-
I love teaching creative writing, and I think I'm good at it, but in a different life, I could have been teaching elementary school.
-
I always wrote as a vehicle for expression but did not try writing for publication until my mid-thirties, at which time I started writing for magazines. I wrote essays and then short stories, then moved into novels.
-
Something I found while writing 'Alice & Oliver' - a book that is unquestionably a work of fiction, but which also borrows details from my own life - is that writing the truth often requires invention and imagination.
-
Writing about what happened to my brother and to my family was awful. It was hard to look back at how much suffering there was and at how certain bad situations were made worse by our decisions.
-
When Shakespeare was writing, he wasn't writing for stuff to lie on the page; it was supposed to get up and move around.
-
What I often do when I'm writing, if I can't find that story, I go out and I hunt for it.
-
In time I began to understand that it's when you start writing that you really find out what you don't know and need to know.
-
I've always thought that whether I'm writing or not, I've gotta pick the best songs, whether or not they're mine. I'm not gonna sing them just because I wrote them. I've gotta find the best songs to make the best record I can.
-
I've been writing and wanting to direct for a long time.
-
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.
-
In the most self-protective of ways, I don't think about the reader when I'm writing - I just think about the story.
-
It's all about the mood I'm in and the scene I'm writing. 'Cause work controls my life, writing controls my life, performing controls my life. So I don't listen to any music that's not an influence on what I'm working on that day. Music is a big influence in my work and sometimes drives the energy of where I want to go.
-
I was 22 and stopped writing plays, and I didn't start again until I was 25. I was writing badly. In college, I attempted to write these more conventional plays, but the theater I loved was downtown experimental theater. I didn't feel like I could do that either. It didn't occur to me to do my own thing.
-
If you're writing a piece for the Boston Pops, the balance is towards one end. If you're writing a piece for a chamber music society, then it's towards another point. I won't make a final answer on that. I think it changes with every piece.
-
When you write fiction, there were things about Washington that I've experienced and wanted to write about, including the swamping nature of it, the compromises people come to town and are forced to make, and also, when writing about Joe McCarthy, the indecency and lies that he put forward that people didn't take a stand about.
-
When I was a teenager, I loved photography and writing.
