Writing Quotes
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There is no left and right in writing. There is only good and bad writing.
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Writing poetry, we live among the wild beasts, and when we touch a man, the stuff of someone in whom we believed, and he goes to pieces like a rotten pie, you... gather together whatever can be salvaged, while I cup my hands around the live coal of life.
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Every new writing project, every new artistic project, needs to be protected so it can grow on its own before it begins to creep out into the world.
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I see writing and acting as different parts of the same continuum. Writing is better for intense emotion. If you're very angry about something, you shouldn't present it as strongly when you're acting. But if you're really angry and writing about it, that's the best way to get it out and across.
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Part of me becomes the characters I'm writing about. I think readers feel like they are there, the way I am, as a result.
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I just sort of write the book I feel like writing given the emotional place I am in my life at the time.
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I was always interested in creative writing growing up. From junior high on, I was writing short stories. I also grew up watching movies. My father would take me to everything. Most weeks, I could open the paper having seen every movie listed.
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One of my earliest memories of writing at a piano was alongside my sister.
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I don't know if there is any one secret to successful writing, but one important step is to move beyond imitation and discover what you can write that no one else can - that is, find out who you are and write that in an appropriate narrative and style.
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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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One of the tricks to writing great plays is to get people in a room together and not let them leave. You want the tension to escalate. Keeping them there is the hardest part, so you have to take away any excuse for them to leave.
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I listen to a lot of different stuff, from Mozart to Johnny Dowd to Monster Magnet. I don't listen to music while I'm writing a draft, but I do listen to it when I'm revising.
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When I wrote 'Dear Fatty,' I realised that sitting and writing alone is an absolute joy.
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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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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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While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels, I liked them. And there was a period when I read many of them. I absorbed the form, and I liked it, it was a good one, mostly the hard-boiled school, you know, Chandler, Hammett, and their heirs. That was the direction that interested me most.
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I'm always writing. And, I mean, I always counsel people when they call me a musician: I really do not have the skills of a musician. I really don't think like a musician, though I love music and I perform and sing.
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I took an MA course in creative writing a couple of years back, and I was definitely in the bottom of the class.
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My novels are in the literature section as opposed to the romance section of bookstores because they're not romance novels. If I tried to have them published as romances, they'd be rejected. I write dramatic fiction; a further sub-genre would classify them as love stories.
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Very few Black people ever embraced back to Africa movements, and very few actually, a tiny number actually went back to Africa. They said, "We are going to make America live up to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States." They produced one of the world's great cultures; they produced individuals who were just as brilliant and made contributions to the world civilization. In fact, they produced a world-class civilization, the African American civilization, in music, in dance, in oratory, in religion, in writing.
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You have to stick to what you love, as writing is such a lonely and depressing existence... stick to what you love and someone will hear your voice.
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Every book is its own experience, the writing of it.
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Yeah, I have the detail-obsessed, controlling personality of a novelist, but I somehow ended up writing plays.
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New songs are why artists go on the road. That's why I go on the road. It's a three-prong play. Writing: You're intrigued. Recording: It brings it to life. And then you want to share it.
