Writing Quotes
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When I and the other young artists were working in comics, our work carried with it a particularly American slant. After all, we were Americans drawing and writing about things that touched us. As it turned out, the early work was, you might say, a comic book version of Jazz.
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I did a lot of freelance desk publishing jobs when I graduated from college. I sort of earned a living doing that while I was writing plays, which was what I wanted to do. My hope was to become a playwright.
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I've always relied a lot on landscape in my books, the atmosphere of a particular place, as well as a fair amount of external action. While writing 'Chance,' it occurred to me that this is the most internal book I've ever written. So much of the action takes place in Chance's head.
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That's what writing is all about, after all, making others see what you have put down on the page and believing that it does, or could, exist and you want to go there.
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There were times in the past that I got angry at some members of the press whose writings greatly disrupted my serious pursuit of art and my behavior as an artist.
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Our sufferings and weaknesses, in so far as they are personal, are of no literary interest whatsoever. They are only interesting in so far as we can see them as typical of the human condition.
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I started writing when I was 21. I was going to become an historian. And then I realized there was more to the world than just the past. I didn't want to spend my life in the library.
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I started writing 'Cod' at a time when people were first beginning to take an interest in the problem of fisheries because the Grand Banks had closed.
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Books provide context and allow you to think about things over time. Film is like writing haiku; there is an immense amount of pleasure in paring down and paring down. But it isn't the same.
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I drop my kid off at school and then race home, and it's a very limited time. I can only do really serious writing for a couple of hours. And then I always go on a walk, I do a one-to-two-hour walk; I don't go running or hard hiking.
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First rule of writing: When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.
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Writing is nothing less than thought transference, the ability to send one's ideas out into the world, beyond time and distance, taken at the value of the words, unbound from the speaker.
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I've had some success at writing and directing, and I like it. It's infinitely more creative than just acting, and I have things I want to say and do.
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The true bureaucrat is a man of really remarkable talents. He writes a kind of English that is unknown elsewhere in the world, and an almost infinite capacity for forming complicated and unworkable rules.
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If you have some other profession that allows you your evenings or weekends, terrific, stick with that. Having a profession other than writing also has the potential side benefit of providing you with material, something to write about.
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Make me a willow cabin at your gate, And call upon my soul within the house; Write loyal cantons of contemned love And sing them loud even in the dead of night.
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Money and writing appear to be mutually exclusive.
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Accepting that part of the process of writing is deleting a lot of what you write is soothing, at least to me.
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Christina Baker Kline writes exquisitely about two unlikely friends—one, a 91-year-old survivor of the grinding poverty of rural Ireland, immigrant New York and the hardscrabble Midwest; and the other, a casualty of a string of foster homes—each struggling to transcend a past of isolation and hardship. Orphan Train will hold you in its grip as their fascinating tales unfold.
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I pay attention to the actors and stuff, but not even that much. I don't pay attention to who's writing.
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Once I've written a song, I sometimes refine them.
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During these continued tough economic times, writing a sensible, fair budget that provides real opportunities for Washington families, workers and businesses is always a challenge.
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Sean Penn, for his acting as well as his writing and directing. There are so many actors I respect, but his reach is so wide.
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It is to be remembered that all art is magical in origin - music, sculpture, writing, painting - and by magical I mean intended to produce very definite results. Paintings were originally formulae to make what is painted happen. Art is not an end in itself, any more than Einstein's matter-into-energy formulae is an end in itself. Like all formulae, art was originally FUNCTIONAL, intended to make things happen, the way an atom bomb happens from Einstein's formulae.
