Writing Quotes
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Endless conflicts. Endless misunderstanding. All life is that. Great and little cannot understand one another.
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I realized, in removing or rewriting these jokes, that often the jokes weren't done or that I was using, for me, the curse words as kind of a crutch. So then I just started writing.
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The writing of a novel or short story or poem or whatever should elevate the audience, not drag the writer down to some level beneath herself. And she - the author - should fight always to prevent that dragging down, especially when the only possible benefit of allowing it to happen is monetary.
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The writing process remained the same pretty much that we have always done. It’s very collaborative and everyone brings their bag of ideas into the room – we all play guitar, we all write lyrics.
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It's fun to have someone to talk to and get input from when you write. I usually get stuck when I'm just in my room writing by myself.
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It took me ten years and seven books to bag an agent - it took me that long to start writing good.
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Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.
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Once we reject lyricism, to blacken a page becomes an ordeal: what’s the use of writing in order to say exactly what we had to say?
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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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[Kurt] Vonnegut was a writer whose great gift was that he always seemed to be talking directly to you. He wasn't writing, he wasn't showing off, he was just telling you, nobody else, what it was like, what it was all about. That intimacy made him beloved. We can admire the art of John Updike or Philip Roth, but we love Vonnegut.
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I knew that, when writing a book, you're not constrained by a budget. You're not constrained by what you can do, in terms of the special effects technology. You're not limited to any particular running time.
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I want to travel around the country and make my living playing music. I also try to behave in a way that I would appreciate as a music fan. That's how we conduct ourselves, be it in writing music or playing it live.
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Writing allows me the time to travel and see the world, which is what I always wanted to do. I'd really like to have been Sir Richard Francis Burton, but it's the wrong century.
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I put off writing the first Left Behind book for a year because I got invited to assist Billy Graham in his memoirs, and had we known what we were putting off for a year, we might not have put it off.
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Everyone has a certain amount of bad writing to get out of their system.
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I was writing from the time I was 12 years old, but I originally wanted to be a novelist.
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I feel like I've got so much to do, from a music perspective. Jamie's done his record and traveled around the world with it. Romy did all those writing sessions. I would love to do what Romy's done and experience that other side of the pop machine. It sounds terrifying and, at times, a little bit soulless. That's a real pet peeve of mine, when people talk about songwriting in a cynical way. But having said that I still want to do it, just to know what it's like.
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We collaborate on everything. I'm involved in the writing and pre-production. There's a whole bunch of people who keep in touch at every step about everything.
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For years we've been playing and writing songs that sound happy. And yet if you listen, the words are all like "My brains are falling out of my ears; would someone please pull me together?"
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When I was writing 'Southeastern,' I'd just recently gotten sober. For me, that was a major turning point in my life. It changed things I did on a day-to-day basis. My whole routine was upended. It took me some time to get used to that and figure out how do I keep myself entertained.
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Some creative writing programs seem evil, but my experience at Irvine was totally the opposite, where I feel like they were really good at focusing in on each writers voice and setting. When I felt like I was obligated to write a story that was more typical, no one really liked it.
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I've always thought that writing isn't really that hard. It's having a good idea that's hard.
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When I'm in full-on writing mode and have the day, I try to get in my office around 10 A.M. and stop once 'Judge Judy' comes on at 4, when I quit and come down. Sometimes, I leave her on while I edit - if she can make the tough calls, then so can I.
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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.
