Writing Quotes
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That's the hard work of writing. The imagining.
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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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Each story presents a mystery that has to be solved in the process of writing. When I'm at work on a story, I'm completely immersed in that world and in the lives of those characters; they're utterly real to me. Then, when I've completed the story, it all just falls away. The whole compulsion to understand is over.
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Having books published is very destructive to writing.
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Writing for the stage is different from writing for a book. You want to write in a way that an actor has material to work with, writing in the first person not the third person, and pulling out the dramatic elements in a bigger way for a stage presentation.
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Your subconscious mind is trying to help you all the time. That's why I keep a journal - not for chatter but for mostly the images that flow into the mind or little ideas. I keep a running journal, and I have all of my life, so it's like your gold mine when you start writing.
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Before I began concentrating on writing, in my free time I was an artist, making and selling etchings illustrating stories based on my readings in classical literature.
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I didn't disappear; I started writing songs and worked behind the scenes.
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I suppose, because I've been able to make a very good living writing books, that going out and finding another million dollars under the sea is not the fascination. The fascination is in finding the ship.
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To write a blues song is to regiment riots and pluck gems from graves.
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I'm good at melody - I'll write the top-line melody and ideal words I want to go with it. But I'm not that good at writing lyrics. I bounce those back and forth with songwriters or someone who can sing.
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Unlike modern military codes, ancient texts are almost never purposely misleading, purposely scrambled. ... indeed, literacy was so uncommon until classical times that the very writing of a message sufficed to keep it from almost everybody.
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In order to even begin to learn how to play his instrument, it takes the guitarist weeks to build calluses on his fingertips; it takes the saxophonist months to strengthen his lip so that he might play his instrument for only a five-minute stretch; it can take the pianist years to develop dual hand and multiple finger coordination. Why do writers assume they can just “write” with no training whatsoever-and then expect, on their first attempt, to be published internationally? What makes them think they're so much inherently greater, need so much less training than any other artists?
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Writing is a vessel...with readers the ocean and authors as its sails.
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See, I have no journalism in my background, so I wasn't practised at research or writing non-fiction, nor at handling the truth in a journalistic way. Journalists know when to call a halt and write something, but I kept on looking for answers.
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Before I published anything, I dreamed of publication, but I didn't actually write for it. I imagined that writing for an audience was something for fancier people. I aspired, but mostly I wrote for myself. I wrote because it made me happy.
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The nature of my work is my subjectivity meshed with other people's subjectivity. So there's a correspondence with that... Even if you write about me, it will reflect on you; everything is a kind of weird collaboration.
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When you work with people and are friends with them also, you have more of a shorthand. I think people relax more and it opens the door to being less precious and trying things that, when you're shooting and writing, it becomes much more collaborative - therefore funny, hopefully.
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Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.
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I follow only one rule in my writing, and that is to be interesting. If the story is interesting to you, the writer, then it will probably be interesting to somebody else.
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Although psychoanalysis has influenced me personally, it has had curiously little influence on my writing. This may be because writers learn from other writers, not from theories.
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I kept on writing and illustrating, for this is what I did well because I loved it.
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I'm very impressionable: I get very taken away by stories and certain feelings. With writing, sometimes I want to feel like a character.
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Writing songs has a lot to do with your sexuality. I danced for awhile and just being around that made me realize what people use. And if you grow up blessed with a certain beauty or a certain intelligence that enhances your beauty, you can get into a better position in life.
