Writing Quotes
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Something I always tell students is, when you're writing something, you want to write the first draft and you want it to come out easily in the beginning. If you're afraid to say what you really have to say, you stammer. [...] You're judging yourself, you know, thinking about your listener. You're not thinking about what you're saying. And that same thing happens when you write.
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I think that anyone who likes writing views 'The New Yorker' as the, you know, pinnacle of the publishing world. If you get 50 words published in 'The New Yorker,' it's more important than 50 articles in other places. So, would I love to one day write for them? I guess. But that's not my sole ambition.
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What I think is important about essayists - about the essay, as opposed to a lot of personal writing that kind of finds its way into public view - is that the material really has to be presented in a processed way.
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I suppose I like certainty as much as anyone else, but I also feel that the hidden costs are high, that we pay a heavy price for our convictions. This is a human issue as well as a writing issue - at least in the personal essay as I practice it. Any real essayist knows that certainty is an editorial decision, arrived at not through conviction but through suppression, the denial of a whole range of possibilities, of alternatives that we jettison, sometimes necessarily, in order to steady the ship.
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First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.
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Our resources may be finite, but our will is infinite, and I am confident that if we come together and summon that great American spirit once again, we will meet the challenges of our time and write the next great chapter in our American story.
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But with writers, there's nothing wrong with melancholy. It's an important color in writing.
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There are two things John and I always do when we're going to sit down and write a song. First of all we sit down. Then we think about writing a song.
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I was very happy sitting alone at a dining room table, writing a script.
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The difficulty in the way of writing a children's play is that Barrie was born too soon. Many people must have felt the same about Shakespeare. We who came later have no chance. What fun to have been Adam, and to have had the whole world of plots and jokes and stories at one's disposal.
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I'm personally attracted to great writing - that's what turns me on the most.
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For those that love the world serve it in action, Grow rich, popular, and full of influence; And should they paint or write still is it action, The struggle of the fly in marmalade.
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Writing's still the most difficult job I've ever had - but it's worth it.
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We're kinda always writing, so it's like we're always thinking about what's next, so that'd be a yes. We're always constantly wanting to get onto the next thing or the new thing.
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Good writing gives energy, whatever it is about.
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If there is anything unique about my writing it is the way that I combine poetry and prose, not just on the level of having a poem here, prose there, but that it really is a true amalgam.
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I don't tend to redraft, I will try to tidy it up, but basically I feel what I write down first has got the impetus, it may be clumsy, it may be repetitive, but a good editor can take that out. That first writing bit is the best thing you will do.
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Some of my best experiences are with writer/directors. Guy Ritchie is one. I feel they have a clearer view of what they want to do. They haven't got to try and interpret someone's writing; it's all theirs. I really admire that.
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I don't think you get to good writing unless you expose yourself and your feelings.
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I don't listen to much music on the go because I tend either to be writing my own music or wanting a break from the music around me.
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I never conceived of not writing a novel. I believed - oh, God, I believed, it was an article of faith! - I was born to write a novel.
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The reason I'm writing funny books is that I wish there were more.
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If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write.
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People who work in factories or in the woods or maybe a dairy farm - for years, I've been fascinated with people like that. No pretensions. They just live their lives. I found them beautiful. They were all I seemed to be interested in writing about.
