Writing Quotes
-
When I used to teach writing, what I would tell my playwriting students is that while you're writing your plays, you're also writing the playwright. You're developing yourself as a persona, as a public persona. It's going to be partly exposed through the writing itself and partly created by all the paraphernalia that attaches itself to writing. But you aren't simply an invisible being or your own private being at work. You're kind of a public figure, as well.
-
Since I was a child, I've liked telling stories. Maybe because my father's a director, I grew up loving stories. I'm not good at spinning them at a dinner table because I do go on a bit, but I love writing them, and directing is just a way of editing the story.
-
A lot of writing is a form of seeing - putting down what you see in terms of action and landscape.
-
Progress was a labyrinth ... people plunging blindly in and then rushing wildly back, shouting that they had found it ... the invisible king-the élan vital-the principle of evolution ... writing a book, starting a war, founding a school.
-
The first set of lyrics for the first songs I ever wrote, which are the ones on 'Pretty Hate Machine,' came from private journal entries that I realized I was writing in lyric form.
-
Writing has become my great joy - I simply love it.
-
I started writing the one-sentence stories when I was translating 'Swann's Way.' There were two reasons. I had almost no time to do my own writing, but didn't want to stop. And it was a reaction to Proust's very long sentences.
-
The problem, for me, with the writing programs is that they produce a terrible uniformity of product.
-
Writing a mystery is more difficult than other kinds of books because a mystery has a certain framework that must be superimposed over the story.
-
Ultimately, a city is formed by its people and the women in Berkeley are just great. They are opinionated, they have ideas, they belong to boards, and they write letters to editors... really wonderful people.
-
A painting lets us know how somebody literally saw things. A piece of music is another language that transmits a whole wealth of emotion and wordless experience. But writing is special in the way at allows us to temporarily enter another person's world, to step outside the boundaries of our own time and space.
-
Fiction is lies; we're writing about people who never existed and events that never happened when we write fiction, whether its science fiction or fantasy or western mystery stories or so-called literary stories. All those things are essentially untrue. But it has to have a truth at the core of it.
-
If I think of a reader while I am writing, the only reader who really matters for me is my wife. It's most important to me that she likes what I write.
-
We need to include more writers from different backgrounds and ethnicities. We need to see different experiences instead of the same people writing the same kinds of stories.
-
'Breaking Bad' - when I started watching that show, I thought it was terrific. I love the way it was shot. I love the writing. I love the arc of Bryan Cranston's character. I just thought that was just really, really a wonderful, wonderful show.
-
I was amplifying the negative at the expense of the positive, not to serve any useful function, not to make my writing better, but to destroy it. The lizard brain, so attuned to people laughing behind our backs, was on high alert for this sort of criticism and would do anything it could to stop me from writing again. I haven't sought out and read a review or a tweet since.
-
There was a long stint during my childhood after I gave up on being a pro football player - we're talking sixth grade here - that I strongly considered a future writing and drawing comic books. I have been making stuff up ever since.
-
I suppose, because I've been able to make a very good living writing books, that going out and finding another million dollars under the sea is not the fascination. The fascination is in finding the ship.
-
I'm a self-taught musician so how I read music is kind of very weak and I kind of read my own version of tablature, I write my own crappy reminders on what I'm playing.
-
Writing poems is a chance to construct spaces that I want to imaginatively inhabit.
-
Writing can sometimes be exploitative. I like to take a few steps of remove in order to respect the privacy of the subject. If readers make the link, they have engaged with the poem.
-
I try to not go, 'I'm writing a pop song.' Music is inherently genre-bending.
-
When I was writing 'You Suck,' in 2006, I constructed the diction of the book's narrator, perky Goth girl Abby Normal, from what I read on Goth blog sites.
-
Don't worry about what anyone else thinks - write what you must.
