Writing Quotes
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When I was 20, I wrote a film on spec and sent it to the BBC. They wrote back, 'Usually, when we reject submissions, we like to offer some encouragement, but in your case, we don't see any point in you continuing.' I took it as encouragement anyway, thinking that only people who write terrible things are capable of writing great things.
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It's always a better choice to write a new book than it is to keep pounding your head against the submissions wall with a book that's just not happening. The next book you write could be the book, the one that isn't a fight to get representation for at all.
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When I'm happiest writing is just not knowing where it goes and just let the characters bring you there.
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The songwriting community in Nashville really is all about your talent. It's not about your image, and you have to be humble. You have to be kind. You have to have zero ego when you walk into that writing room.
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Unless one is a genius, it is best to aim at being intelligible.
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Writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy and freedom.
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I suppose with any good writing and interesting characters, you can have that awfully overused word: a journey.
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I got to take classes in writing with a fountain pen, and actually, something you make is your own textbook. So, while you're learning about something, you have to write essays on it, and then you handwrite in cursive, in fountain pen, your essays out on beautiful paper and you bind it together into a book that you hand in at the end of the course.
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When I started to write, it was the '70s, and throughout that decade, we didn't have any problems with book challenges or censorship.
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I got a lot of flak originally for writing with photographs, because the great cliche in photography is that one photograph is worth a thousand words, and photographers are usually dodo birds anyway.
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I think the best thing for us is to just write songs that we like.
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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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I've never had any interest at all in being a journalist or writing some sort of historically accurate autobiography.
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I do feel like animated films really combine a lot of different of art forms: film-making and writing and drawing and painting - to a certain extent, even sculpting. It's a wonderful medium to work with as a craftsman because it's such so rich and so varied and so expressive.
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It's the feeling of being lifted out of my life into another world that is the thrill of writing fiction.
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I never, ever drink while writing. Never have from the start, and I'm happy that I never have to. A lot of my stuff is plot-driven and mathematical, and I think you need a clean and sober mind to pin down the logistics of that.
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If there is one thing left that I would like to do, it's to write something really beautiful. And I could do it, you know. I could still do it.
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That to me is the way any good romantic would look at his life: Live it first, then write it down before you go.
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Writing is an outlet, but it’s not an outlet of escape. People keep a journal when they want to escape. I write to rub my face in it.
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Writing is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living.
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Every time I think I know what's right and wrong, I end up being wrong. All I want to do is explore. I want to see what people would do. I say, 'What would this person do in this situation?' and I write it down. I'm not writing manifestos of my political views.
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Writing fiction was a way to take the ideas that troubled me or confused me and put them under pressure.
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I had a lot of notes and fragments and observations that never amounted to anything. After the Wall had gone down, so many people were writing about Berlin, I didn't have the same urgency or feel enough authority.
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If you're reading something from a Nobel Prize-winning physicist next to some guy in his underwear writing in his basement, or his mom's basement, on text, it looks like it's equally plausible.
