Writing Quotes
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Like most writers, I find the Web is a wonderful distraction. Who doesn't need that last minute research before writing?
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The simple act of writing down a goal and making a written plan for its accomplishment moves you to the top 3 percent.
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Reading while I'm writing ideally inspires my competitive side. When I read great writers, I want to be a better writer.
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I have written my whole life. I remember writing as a small child.
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I would prefer that, rather than sitting down and giving someone advice, I would way rather write a song about what I was going through. I think that's a pure, organic process of learning from someone else's mistakes.
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The most important lesson my parents taught me is that writing is a job, one that requires discipline and commitment. Most of the time it's a fun job, a wonderful job, but sometimes it isn't, and those are the days that test you.
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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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Improvisation is just writing in front of an audience.
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I think everyone assumes that I talk to my parents a lot about writing, but I didn't - they're my parents. We didn't have constant workshops running in my household.
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The whole idea of spellbinding, of being an entertainer, being the center of the stage, making up words - that let me know that writing is nice.
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I think enthusiasm is the answer to passionate writing.
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I began wanting to create a detective who really turned the tables on that image of women, to know that you could have a sex life and not be a bad person. You could have a sex life and still solve your own problems. It was eight years from when I started having the fantasy that I was going to create such a detective to when I actually sat down and came up with V. I. Warshawski. It was a long, slow journey to come to a writing voice and do that character.
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I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like child stringing beads in kindergarten, - happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.
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We do very little re-writing in the office. We often take on people who show great promise and who we hope will develop into somebody important and someone good.
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Is a gesture of charity genuine or is it a kind of deep moral tax write-off?
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By the time I was at college, I became very alert to the question of racial discrimination, and I remember one of my first writing attempts had to do with a lynching.
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I'm incapable of writing without social commentary. I like to think that it's integrated and not really heavy handedly didactic.
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When I retired, I was at an in-between age. I wasn't a child anymore, I wasn't really a woman yet, and they weren't really writing scripts for that age.
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All political movements are basically anti-creative - since a political movement is a form of war. "There's no place for impractical dreamers around here," that's what they always say. "Your writing activities will be directed, kindly stop horsing around." "As for the smoking of marijuana, it is the exploitation for the workers." Both favor alcohol and are against pot.
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I once saw Dizzy Gillespie at a live show, and it made me want to go home immediately and start writing.
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When I write I have no loyalty except to historical truth as I see it and care no more about British achievements and mistakes than any other.
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As a songwriter, I try not to be sloppy; same with the music. You can be very lean, very efficient, so you're not wasting a lot of time getting' to the point. You're saying it with as pure a word or phrase as you can. That's the part that was craft. You refine and refine and refine. Maybe that's why the songs still hang on, because they're very pure. For one thing, they're very short. "Bad Moon Rising" is like 2 minutes and 12 seconds. I would try to do everything as quickly and with as little extra as possible. It was a challenge.
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I think it was the fact that I liked it so much that made the writing just come out of me automatically.
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The aftermath of the war is what inspired us to write many of our plays. The whole reason for our writing Inherit the Wind was that we were appalled at the blacklisting. We were appalled at thought control.
