Writing Quotes
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When you are writing, of course, you have to do all that writing and correcting for yourself. When I was a librarian it was expected that I would know about a wide range of books.
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I got a job in advertising. So even though I was writing, I was always supporting myself. That's the thing that would matter for my father, who was absolutely a creature of the Great Depression.
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You spend most of your life working and trying to hone your craft, working on your chops, working on your writing, and you don't really think about accolades. Then you get a bit older and they start coming your way. It's a nice pat on the back.
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I'm halfway through a novel set in two time frames - Austin in the 1960's and Alpine Texas in present day. It started out to be a small, lighthearted, humorous book about family relationships; I was tired of writing war stories and tragedies.
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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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With writing music and writing songs and recording music and coming up with stuff, you need to kind of reengage that kind of inner child to come up with interesting perceptions.
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'Sunday Morning Coming Down' is probably the most directly autobiographical thing I'd written. In those days, I was living in a slum tenement that was torn down afterwards, but it was $25 a month in a condemned building, and 'Sunday Morning Coming Down' was more or less looking around me and writing about what I was doing.
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I'm doing a couple books at Dynamite. I'm writing Doc Savage over there.
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I think I have a harder time writing about things that I am not actually going through.
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Once you finish a book, it doesn't belong to you anymore. You're giving it to other people. If something in what a writer writes can excite the imagination and the feelings of the reader, then that reader carries it around forever. Nothing is more vivid than good fiction.
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I like the process of pencil and paper as opposed to a machine. I think the writing is better when it's done in handwriting.
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Despite wanting to work in publishing, I was a publisher's worst nightmare: I rarely bought new books. So my goal was to publish the kind of books I would buy, and read. My reading habits have changed since starting the press. The only other "goal", per say, is to continue to experiment. I don't want the press to ever fall into a formula, or to be pigeonholed - "They do great reissues of modernist poets!" - I want to keep pushing, exploring the kind of title we can get away with. And working with authors who challenge the way I think about writing, editing and reading.
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When you recognize good writing and you're lucky enough to get it, like with Lost, that's what I follow.
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There is nothing you can do except try to write it the way that it was. So you must write each day better than you possibly can and use the sorrow that you have now to make you know how the early sorrow came. And you must always remember the things you believed because if you know them they will be there in the writing and you won’t betray them. The writing is the only progress you make.
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Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do.
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Writing is solitary, so I love going out once in a while and meeting my readers. I'll often hang with them after a signing for some beers. They're invariably bright!
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I just write what I think is good and keep it at a thousand words.
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To begin with, our perception of the world is deformed, incomplete. Then our memory is selective. Finally, writing transforms.
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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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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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I was really surprised at the success of 'House of Sand and Fog,' because it is so awfully dark. Believe it or not, when writing it, I never had the word 'tragedy' in my head - I wasn't trying to write a dark book at all.
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It's sort of one ongoing process where writing ends and directing starts.
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I try to keep my eyes and ears open all the time for the bones of my next song: things people say, melodies I hear in my head, and little musical parts I may stumble across. I write them down or record them on my phone. Whatever I need to do to keep the idea for later when I have the time to sit down with it. So writing for me is a 24/7 pursuit.
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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?
