Writing Quotes
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You can be whoever you want to be when you are writing songs.
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The only reason we write - well, the only reason why I write; maybe I shouldn't generalize - is so that I can find out something about myself. Writers have this narcissistic obsession about how we got to be who we are. I have to understand my ancestors - my father, his mother and her mother - to understand who I am. It all leads back to the narcissistic pleasure of discovering yourself.
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Joaquin Jackson's frank and colorful account of his long career as a modern-day Texas Ranger thrills like an action novel, yet the stories are true, sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, but always gripping. I could hardly put the book down. . . .The writing is superb.
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I am not quite sure how writing changes things, but I know that it does. It is indirect-like the trails of earthworms aerating the earth. It is not always deliberate-like the tails of glowing dust dragged by comets.
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I write of youth, of love, and have access by these to sing of cleanly wantonness.
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I don't have any sense of an audience when I'm writing. I don't consider the audience. Because all I'm interested in is the problem on the page.
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If you're writing a novel, you can afford to see where the spirit takes you, but in terms of structure and engineering with a screenplay, you have to be quite pragmatic; otherwise, it will run away from you.
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Once I get my writing done, then I can turn my attention elsewhere - and not the other way around. The writing has to be the foundation.
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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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I have a confession to make. For years, I earned a living - or a sort of living - writing negative book reviews.
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Which, of course, isn't the point of writing - but it would be nice if, along with the creative satisfaction of writing and seeing my work in print, I could do more than merely scrape a living. Okay, moaning over.
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David Mamet was great to work with. He was everything that I thought he would be as a director. He's incredibly articulate, an easy collaborator. Extraordinarily knowledgeable about film and writing.
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I was writing songs by 12 and had a band by 14.
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My life's purpose is to write poetry - but behind the poetry must be the vision of a fresh revelation for men.
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One of the big breakthroughs, I think for me, was reading Robert A. Heinlein's four rules of writing, one of which was, 'You must finish what you write.' I never had any problem with the first one, 'You must write' - I was writing since I was a kid. But I never finished what writing.
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The biggest takeaway for anyone seeking to write is this: don't go looking for the way other authors do their work. You won't find many who are consistent enough to copy, and there are enough variations in approach that it's obvious that it's not like hitting home runs or swinging a golf club. There isn't a standard approach, there's only what works for you (and what doesn't).
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I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.
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I find it hard to think of myself as selling books. I don't even have a Web site. I want to sit and write, not sell.
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When I was still in prep school - 14, 15 - I started keeping notebooks, journals. I started writing, almost like landscape drawing or life drawing. I never kept a diary, I never wrote about my day and what happened to me, but I described things.
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It's weird to try to write lyrics for somebody else. They can't really get behind what you're saying or what you want them to say because they didn't experience it.
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I think all writing is an attempt to complicate and subvert the dominant narrative. Writing personalizes statistics. It puts a face and a name on a number. I suppose in that sense it's always political.
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The DCU Constantine has to be the guy we know and love, with his same failings - otherwise what's the point of using him? But as I'm writing him, he's younger and has perhaps been through a bit less than the battered, aging old sod we meet in Vertigo.
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I lived for two years in Odawara, a castle town an hour outside of Tokyo, near the sea. It's a beautiful place, and I drew on my experiences there when writing 'The Lake of Dreams.'
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I don't know why I write. If I knew the answer, I probably wouldn't have to. But it is a compulsion. You don't choose it, it chooses you. And I wouldn't recommend it to anybody.
