Writing Quotes
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As well as writing novels and doing short-order journalism, I am also the full-time carer of my husband, who has Alzheimer's. Each day feels like a race that must be run.
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What a writer has to do is write what hasn't been written before or beat dead men at what they have done.
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Writing was my route to creative expression, and I needed to write about the things that interested me.
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Swing your partner, dosey-do, now clap your hands... uh-oh, that's all the square dance moves I know... I'll bluff the rest. Slap your partner in the face, Write bad checks all over the place, Flirt with strangers, annoy your spouse, Get a divorce and lose your house, ...uh... dosey-do.
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I studied arranging and orchestration a number of years ago, so I have a home studio and arrange about three-fourths of my songs on the computer. Since writing orchestration is tedious, I often put an arrangement on the keyboard and let someone better-qualified finish it.
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My question is "when did other people give up the idea of being a poet?" You know, when we are kids we make up things, we write, and for me the puzzle is not that some people are still writing, the real question is why did the other people stop?
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I'm always most interested in writing about things that I don't understand.
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Easy writing makes hard reading.
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I don't think I've ever felt terribly comfortable writing about my body. First of all, I think I took my body for granted for so many years. I abused it a lot.
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You must learn to overcome your very natural and appropriate revulsion for your own work.
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I've included these little jokes and mysteries in my writing for the amusement of readers.
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The way I feel about every book is this: you don't finish it, you abandon it. All of my books have in some sense failed, otherwise I wouldn't write another one. If I wrote the perfect book, I wouldn't have to write again, and I wouldn't want to. That's not true for everyone, but it's true for me. I could walk away then. But so far I haven't managed to do it.
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The problems that other writers encounter are so fascinating to me as a writer and as a thinker about writing. I have found that many times, my students are experiencing problems that I myself have experienced in my work, but the solution is different because they're different people.
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I will get a loan and pay the money the court asks for. But I will not lay down my writing and I still say this was an important book to write.
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Being able to incorporate my language into songs is really cool. It's really cool to see that people are susceptible to it. It helps with writing a lot to turn off one language and then go to another.
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I am a businessman at the end of the day. I have grown up with Excel sheets. I start out writing my novel with spreadsheets and the milestones in each chapter highlighted.
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My writing has always been what you call 'narrative fiction' in the sense that it's got very strong plots and twists at the end.
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I thought a director was like a pillow who sat under the writer, supporting them and submitting to their vision. It took me a long time to realise that what a writer really wants is a production that matches the play and the writing. It is the only way the play can achieve its full potential.
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If Jennifer Lopez could write songs like Fiona Apple's, she wouldn't have to spend so many hours at the gym.
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I'd written Smashed not because I was ambitious and not because writing down my feelings was cathartic (it felt more like playing one's own neurosurgeon sans anesthesia). No. I'd made a habit--and eventually a profession--of memoir because I hail from one of those families where shows of emotions are discouraged.
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A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.
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Everybody comes to the planet with certain gifts. It may be writing, it may be acting, it may be singing, it may be being a lawyer, it may be making a beautiful cabinet, it may be being a spectacular dry cleaner. It could be anything. We all have gifts in different areas.
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It's a cliche, but true, that writing is intensely solitary and at times really lonely. I sit in one room and talk to squirrels and blue jays all day.
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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.
