Writing Quotes
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One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.
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I just play music by listening and responding, so I don't know anything about writing songs or arranging and all of this stuff. You know, it's in my head, but I don't know how to get it out.
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Broadsheets can be scathing. But I have respect for broadsheet journalists because they haven't succumbed to degrading themselves, to writing pidgin English with all these terrible colloquialisms, the phrasing of which is just, like, embarrassing.
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I started writing at the age of seventeen because I had a teacher in high school who said that we had to get something accepted by a national magazine to get an A. The teacher later withdrew that threat, but the writing bug bit me.
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I started writing songs by myself. That always came from whatever I was feeling and being honest about that because I never had any intention of anyone ever hearing them.
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Part of the joy of music is listening to lots of different kinds of music and learning from it. Specifically for me, I like writing songs that move me, and what moves me are beautiful songs on the piano or the guitar and really, really heavy music.
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Write about what you care about. If you do that, you're probably going to do your best writing, reach off the page and touch the reader. How are you going to make the reader care if you don't care yourself?
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Research is not an obstacle, something to be frightened of. It can be one of the real joys of writing.
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My first semester, I got a D in creative writing.
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It kills your writing if you try to manipulate it with crude politics.
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The phenomenon of university creative writing programs doesn't exist in France. The whole idea is regarded as a novelty, or an oddity.
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Music - which I could never listen to while writing before I had children - became essential to my process.
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Find what gave you emotion; what the action was that gave you excitement. Then write it down making it clear so that the reader can see it too. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
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I've been writing poems and stories since I was about 13.
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When you are happy it is harder to write [songs].
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When I'm working, on stage, entertaining people, or watching someone do something amazing, it inspires me to be the best artist that I can be. I enjoy being around art - whether it be a museum, a Broadway show - or even writing a poem. Those are things that make me feel alive and inspire me.
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I think what makes people think that is because of things people write. It really doesn't have anything to do with the artist.
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A song like 'Shooting Star' - the thought process behind writing that song was that I looked around and thought, 'Wow, there's a lot of people dying at that time in the music business.'
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When you're writing, you're making decisions about compression and the shape of a life, which are very similar to how we experience our inner consciousness.
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Writing is busy idleness.
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Twitter taught me how to become better at writing jokes because it forces you to chip away at all the extraneous words.
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The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.
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The core of my career is my teaching and my writing.
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Every decade of my life I attempted to write a novel. But I had nothing to say. I was far too self-absorbed, and now I realize I was writing for others, so that they'd applaud me, see my genius, tell me how wonderful I am, or be jealous of my success.
