Writing Quotes
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I love writing songs with people, which is about really taking risks, throwing yourself over the falls and really seeing what you're made of and seeing how it sticks. Seeing how others react to it, and seeing also how it can become a melody and how it can really take off from your experience. It's a way of seeing life unfold on the page before me.
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In the book, I write about children in first grade who were taught to read by reading want ads. They learned to write by writing job applications. Imagine what would happen if anyone tried to do that to children in a predominantly white suburban school.
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When I'm sitting writing, I know that something works if I've made myself cry, or laugh, or have a visceral emotion.
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Sometimes I get in writing moods and I want to write a song every couple of days. Then sometimes I may not write a song for three weeks. It's just according to how it's hitting me at the time.
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I always begin my stories as experiments - on large yellow tablets - a mixture of writing and sketching.
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I try to do as little as possible without looking like an idiot. Research is fun and easy. Writing is hard. So I try not to let the research become an excuse to not do the writing part.
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I was able to not fold and go in a corner because I had my writing as therapy, but also as my tool for struggle.
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If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.
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I've been writing poems and stories since I was about 13.
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By the time I was 23 or 24 and had written the first manuscript of 'The Final Winter', I knew I wanted to make it a career but didn't know how. It took me a long time to grow into myself, but when my love of writing returned, it did so with an enormous amount of venom. It is now a mainstay in my life.
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I've always equated the writing process with editing, sort of like when I get through editing the movie, that's like my last draft of the screenplay.
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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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I enjoy writing.
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What does it mean to not be alone? I've approached that question through music, technology, writing and other means.
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I worked in a number of high schools in New York, and I wound up at Stuyvesant High School, which is known nationally for producing brilliant scientists and mathematicians, but I had writing classes. I thought I was teaching. They thought I was teaching, but I was learning.
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Flaubert read too many books, and in consequence some of his own books stagger under the weight of his erudition. He said he'd read some preposterous number of books to prepare for the writing of Salammbô, and you can feel them dragging the novel down. It would have been much better if he'd made it all up.
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When I'm writing a song for another artist, I purposefully make it not for me; otherwise, I get too attached.
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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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When I'm writing fiction, I'm sort of interested by the fact that somehow or other I can have the feeling of actually seeing things through someone else's eyes.
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It's impossible to control the reception of your work - the only thing you can control is the experience of writing itself, and the work you create.
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I don't know if I see myself as really an action hero, but I like doing physical movies and I like doing movies where the writing is very lean.
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I couldn't think about novels at all. It seemed the only writing that was appropriate to that horrendous event was journalism, reportage. And, in fact, I think the profession rose quite honorably to the task. Novelists require a slower turnover, I mean, in time.
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The really good stuff- the 'Hamiltons' - comes out after decades of writing and being committed.
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Writing doesn't mean necessarily putting words on a sheet of paper. You can write a chapter while walking or eating.
