Writing Quotes
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The art of the three-minute song is more like journalism than writing a big 400-page book. You want to be brief, you want to make sense right yen and there. And sometimes that takes a bit of work.
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I thought I was writing for a fairly hip, intelligent crowd; I just thought there were more of them out there. But they're not. They're not out there waiting. They're not gonna use their intelligence on your book.
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I'm trying my best to sound like me rather than trying my best to write hits or praying to God that people respond. I've arrived in a very healthy place and it feels great!
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Well, Toronto, I consider to be the birthplace of my films. I've made three films and this is the third one to premiere here in the same theater on the same day at the same time - they are my audience. They're the people that I think about while I'm writing, directing, and editing. I specifically make movies for them.
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Writing music and lyrics that mean something personal to me. It's an exciting, intense, cathartic, this-is-who-I-am experience.
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I don't like characters who are either good or bad. I just don't experience that in life, so my writing hasn't evolved that way.
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No one looks at your hands to see how much they shake when you are interviewed to be a surgeon. The physical skills required are no greater than for writing cursive script. If an operation requires so much skill only a few surgeons can do it, you modify the operation to make it simpler.
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Even a song like 'Give Love,' in my head, there's a question as I'm writing it, going, 'Is this cheesy? Is it too on the nose to say 'give love?''
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There are many ways of writing badly about painting... There is an 'appreciative' language of threadbare, not inaccurate, but overexposed and irritating words... the language of the schools which 'situates' works and artists in schools and movements... novelists and poets [that] see paintings as allegories of writing.
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My lab and academic work fill my day from about 9 am to 7 p.m. Then I zoom out the lens to work on my other writing.
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In my ideal writing environment, I'd be surrounded by nice visual art in a room with a window and high ceilings. The window would have to give me natural light.
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When I'm writing comics, I'm also visualizing how the story will look on the page - not even always art-wise, but panel-wise, like how a moment will be enhanced dramatically by simply turning a page and getting a reveal. It requires thinking about story in a way I never had to consider when I was writing prose.
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A decade in advertising exposed me to plenty of schemers and backstabbers. But honestly, advertising is wonderful training for fiction. Writing novels is much easier if you've ever tried to write a billboard.
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Writing a book is as difficult or as easy as any other job. Everyone's job is difficult. So to fetishize difficulties in writing as something extra-difficult or something very privileged - I don't buy that at all.
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You must learn to overcome your very natural and appropriate revulsion for your own work.
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The process of writing and creating and answering that very unique call inside yourself has nothing to do with agents and sales and all that stuff.
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Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.
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The art of writing is to explain the complications of the human soul with the simplicity that can be universally understood.
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The point of essays is the point of writing anything. It's not to tell people what they already think or to give them more of what they already believe; it's to challenge people, and it's to suggest alternate ways of thinking about things.
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When I first started writing, I was living in England and I had that uniquely English sense of sarcasm, which has definitely seemed to have left me. I am a naturalized American and my sensibility has become far more American.
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For me writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz.
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I write to try to find out who I am. One of my main themes is manliness. I think I'm trying to figure out what manliness really is.
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I went to school for creative writing in college, and I wound up about six hours short of my degree.
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If you read a book about school - someone else's book - you always translate it into your own school experiences. It's describing the student: he's bewildered and lost in a large crowd in a university classroom. You'll visualize that from your own experiences. So, everything you know is what you're really writing.
