Writing Quotes
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An Englishman never takes his collar off when he is writing. How can you expect him to show you his soul?
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Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.
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Advice to young writers wo want to get ahead without any annoying delays: don't write about Man, write about a man.
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Writing, for me, is very inspiration-dependent. And inspiration can be a jerk.
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It's harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better.
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I try to not go, 'I'm writing a pop song.' Music is inherently genre-bending.
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I don't know if there are topics that I unconsciously avoid, but as soon as they pop up in my writing, I try to take on those topics, whether or not I publish the poems.
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Poetry is a way for me to explore a tingly feeling, to let it play itself out, and also to map it. I feel like I'm making little star maps when I write poems.
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I wouldn't describe myself as a do-gooder. That's really more my wife. I'm kind of just the obsessed guy who's been writing and making movies since I was a little kid, just in a room and make it.
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It varies from song to song, although Buck Owens and I recently collaborated on writing a duet together and am looking forward with a great deal of anticipation to recording that track for the new studio album.
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If somebody asked for the first draft of something I'd written, it'd probably be pretty close to whatever got published. I get enjoyment out of writing, but I get absolutely no enjoyment out of rewriting, so I don't do much of it. The more you work on something, certainly, the better it gets. But there's also a pretty clear law of diminishing returns.
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I haven't felt the excitement of listening to as well as creating music along with reading and writing for too many years now. I feel guilty beyond words about these things. For example, when we're backstage and the lights go out and the manic roar of the crowds begins, it doesn't affect me the way in which it did for Freddy [sic] Mercury who seemed to love, relish in the love and adoration from the crowd, which is something I totally admire and envy.
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Mostly, I would like people to ask other writers about the craft of their writing so we could learn from one another. We ask movie directors why they chose to use certain lights and angles and speeds of film, but most of the time, we ignore the craft of a writer.
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If you're going to write a song, try to get together with a collaborator because it's better to write with collaborators.
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The first thing you have to do is get immersed in the project, organizing yourself, knowing what you are going after and not going after. It is extremely important to know what you don't want to find. Research to me is as important or more important than the writing. It is the foundation upon which the book is built.
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Writing graffiti is about the most honest way you can be an artist. It takes no money to do it, you don't need an education to understand it, and there's no admission fee.
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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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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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Goals are the fuel in the furnace of achievement. Think on paper and write them down!
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It can be stressful if I wrote something that I realize doesn't sound right. I can write something at home and be like, "Great. Nailed it." Then I'm like, "No one should have to say those words. That doesn't make any sense." It's a lot of scrambling.
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Writing tends to be very deliberate. A novelist could probably run a military campaign with some success. They could certainly run a country.
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If I'm at home on my own and the writing isn't going well, I clean my house. And there have been times in the past few years when my house has looked really clean.
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Something I found while writing 'Alice & Oliver' - a book that is unquestionably a work of fiction, but which also borrows details from my own life - is that writing the truth often requires invention and imagination.
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I think people feel very comfortable reviewing the idea of me, as opposed to what I've actually written. Most of the time, when people write about one of my books, they're really just writing about what they think I may or may not represent, as sort of this abstract entity. Is that unfair? Not really. If I put myself in this position where I'm going to kind of weave elements of memoir into almost everything, well, I suppose that's going to happen.
