Writing Quotes
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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?
Bao Phi
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What I always wanted to be was a magician... My real upbringing when I was a teenager was doing magic shows, all over the state, with my father and brothers. Doing magic, you not only have to be able to do a trick, you have to have a little story line to go with it. And writing is essentially a trick.
Ken Kesey
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I'm just writing what I feel, and I really don't think I've done anything wrong that I need to hide. The biggest thing, and I don't even like to bring it up, is my children - you know, you've gotta protect them.
Gwen Stefani
No Doubt
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I've tried writing with music on, but I find it distracting.
John Grisham
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When I began, the guitar was en-closed in a vicious circle. There were no composers writing for the guitar, be-cause there were no virtuoso guitarists.
Andres Segovia
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I spent a good part of the nineties roaming the Earth writing about conflict. It was very grueling. I was beginning to find this way of life was, wow, addictive and deeply meaningful.
Janine di Giovanni
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Breaking records is not something you expect to be doing. That's like a sports thing, it's not usually a comedy and writing thing.
Louis C. K.
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Somewhere in university, I realized that I hadn't been to classes in months, and I'd get tired to the point of narcolepsy doing anything other than some form of performing, directing, writing, or acting.
William Shatner
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For me the writing, when I'm going to direct it myself, is really just the first draft, and I don't change it very much; I only change it on average about two lines per movie.
John Sayles
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It's funny how you can struggle with one piece and write a better one in a minute. When things come easy, it means it's good.
Joe Satriani
Chickenfoot
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I write different kinds of sentences, depending on what the book is, and what the project is. I see my work evolving. I'm writing long sentences now, something I didn't use to do. I had some kind of breakthrough, five or six years ago, in Invisible, and in Sunset Park after that. I discovered a new way to write sentences. And I find it exhilarating.
Paul Auster
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And when we are writing the life of a woman, we may, it is agreed, waive our demand for action, and substitute love instead. Love, the poet has said, is a woman's whole existence.
Virginia Woolf
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I usually don't have to do a lot of research in my work, as I'm writing about something I'm already familiar with.
Amy Bloom
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I write from this tight third-person viewpoint, where each chapter is seen through the eyes of one individual character. When I'm writing that character, I become that character and identify with that character.
George R. R. Martin
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Doctoral training is devoted almost entirely to learning to do research, even though most Ph.Ds who enter academic life spend far more time teaching than they do conducting experiments or writing books.
Derek Bok
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Writing can be a frightening, distressing business, and whatever kind of structure or buffer is available can help a lot.
Aimee Bender
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I remember I was very taken with a book called DreamTigers by Jorge Luis Borges. He was at the University of Texas, Austin, and they collected some of his writings and put them in a little collection. It's called DreamTigers in English, but it doesn't exist in Spanish. It's a little sampler. But that collection in English is what struck me, because in there he has his poems, and I was a poet as well as a fiction writer.
Sandra Cisneros
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I always liked to write and had fun writing, but I didn't have any pretensions about being a writer. I liked to read and liked to putz around and write little stories or poems, but my thing was sports.
John Edgar Wideman
