Writing Quotes
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I was just writing songs because, if a song shows up, you've gotta write it. I didn't know what to do with them. I didn't have any faith in my voice.
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What makes for great art is the courage to speak and write and paint what you know and care about.
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It was just me in my basement honing my skills, hearing songs on the radio and trying to manipulate them and then writing over those, and I started with local artists in Boston, writing records for them.
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Every story teaches me how to write it. Unfortunately, it doesn't teach me how to write the next one.
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I wish, in some ways, I was the type of comedian who could do something blistering and topical, but I'm the guy who gets stuck in the revolving door and thinks I should write about that.
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I really do believe that chance favours a prepared mind. Wallace Stegner, who was one of my teachers when I was at Stanford, preached that writing a novel is not something that can be done in a sprint. That it's a marathon. You have to pace yourself. He himself wrote two pages every day and gave himself a day off at Christmas. His argument was at the end of a year, no matter what, you'd got 700 pages and that there's got to be something worth keeping.
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I want to write a novel about Silence," he said; “the things people don’t say.
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The great thing about string quartets is the players are kind of like family. They work really well as a unit, so you can write things that let them use those talents of association and intuition-all the things they’ve developed together as a group.
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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.
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I sense a kind of fear of writing black or Asian characters from non-ethnic writers, who perhaps feel that they don't know the culture and therefore can't write about it. By and large, if there's an Asian character, I might get a call. But if the character is called 'Philip,' the chances are I won't.
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Donors are sick of writing that $200 check to the Red Cross and not knowing whether it goes for the executive director's salary or the office rent.
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The problem with merely writing so that you can be understood is that the wrong people, in advancing their agendas, are only too ready to misunderstand you. Writing so that you cannot be misunderstood anticipates and preempts those who would willfully distort what you are trying to say.
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When you're making music, it's meant to be shared with people. Sometimes, even if I'm writing a song, someone else brings a vibe. There's something different about it. If someone can play a better bassline than me, I'll let them do it. I'm just here to fit in and see where it goes.
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I like beautiful writing, pain, unexpected humor, and the message that, at the last second, people are going to be kind to each other. It almost doesn't matter what the genre is.
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We all know that the great memories of our childhood are the little triumphs - it doesn't really matter whether that was in writing, art, on the hockey field or on the football field. It's something that makes you feel - 'I can do this stuff'.
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Why illustrate a great piece of writing whose very advocacy and evocation and efficacy lies within its very existence as writing?
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Everyone would like to be on Broadway, cause if a show works, you make a great deal of money and it allows you to write other shows.
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I noticed when I was writing the book that I would tend to mention 'outside' songs right through to about the middle of the 70's. And then all of a sudden that starts disappearing from the book, and just about everything I'm talking about from that point on are the records that I'm totally involved in.
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I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.
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I had enormous self-image, problems and very low self-esteem, which I hid behind obsessive writing and performing. It's exactly what I do now except I enjoy it now. I'm not driven like I was in my twenties. I was driven to get through life very quickly.
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My first drafts are always terrible, and I hate them, but the process for me is all about writing the bad version until it tells you what the good version is. And then you write that.
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For me, it's always about what's on the page. I have tremendous respect for writing. When you recognize good writing, and you're lucky enough to get it, like with 'Lost,' that's what I follow.
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If you want more diversity in the industry, you need diverse people writing scripts and developing them.
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Youths write me and tell me that their band will go nowhere because of all the bad bands in the world. I tell them there has always been awful music and that no great band ever wasted any time complaining, they just got it done. Their ropey ranting is just a way to get out of the hard work of making music that will do some lasting damage.
