Writing Quotes
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In hindsight, I must have been looking for a way to write about Jewishness that somehow managed to minimize irony and self-deprecation.
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Because good writing in a TV cartoon is so rare, I think the animation on The Simpsons is often overlooked.
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Since I'm a fan of collections and anthologies, believe that the best writing often shines in shards and galloping stretches, I never find myself lobbying for a writer I enjoy reading regularly to hole up in Heidegger's hut for four or five years to bring forth a mountain.
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Acting is easier - writing is more creative. The lazy man vies with the industrious.
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Writers ever since writing began have had problems, and the main problem narrows down to just one word - life.
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I don't listen to anything when I'm writing. I need total quiet, which is astounding, given that I spent years working for a newspaper and having to write features surrounded by ringing phones and people shouting.
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For a while there, our writing got really edgy... I've always written about experiences, so when your life gets a bit crazy, you start to write songs that are a bit edgy.
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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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Your writing voice is the deepest possible reflection of who you are. The job of your voice is not to seduce or flatter or make well-shaped sentences. In your voice, your readers should be able to hear the contents of your mind, your heart, your soul.
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When I'm writing fiction I'm thinking, God, this is so hard - I have to make all this stuff up! I wish I were writing a nonfiction book where all the facts are laid out and I don't have to be so much at sea.
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I do a lot of writing. People don't actually know how much writing really I do.
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The savants will write excellent volumes. There will be laureates. But wars will continue just the same until the forces of the circumstances render them impossible.
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Sometimes a poem starts because I feel the urge to write about something from which I carry a great deal of shame, and I try to sketch out in writing how I am complicit in whatever dynamic it is I am illuminating. And sometimes it comes later, when I step back and challenge myself - am I being honest here?
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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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The challenge of writing books for teenagers is walking the fine line between truth and what the publishers, parents, and the more conservative librarians want to hear.
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I can write songs, I've had songs in movies, but I can't compose film scores, you know?
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Retiring from writing is not to retire from life.
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I often write two books simultaneously. Usually one of them starts out as a fun experiment designed to give me a daily break from the real book I'm writing. And then that becomes a real book too.
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What a thrill it is to have my writing recognized by an institution as admirable and vital as the National Endowment for the Arts.
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It's really hard to write about art in general. But it's exceptionally hard to fictionalize art and make work that isn't a parody, or is something that could withstand critique and exist in the art world as a valuable object, or a true piece.
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I have two little children. I didn't want to be missing their childhood while I was away, busy writing about children.
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My goal is to think of nothing when I'm writing a song because too many influences could sabotage a potentially amazing song.
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Wrrite, wrrite, Lapochka, why you don’t wrrite?” and assure me that a horse, even with four legs, stumbles. I found it difficult to explain to her what I was writing. “It’s about Colley Cibber,” I said. “He was an actor, playwright and poet.” “Also poet?” Varya asked suspiciously. “Who he? Pushkin?”
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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.
