Writing Quotes
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For 2,500 years, people have been writing odes. Why? I think that there's something innately human in wanting to praise the world even though it's disappointing in so many ways. There's always that tension.
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I was amplifying the negative at the expense of the positive, not to serve any useful function, not to make my writing better, but to destroy it. The lizard brain, so attuned to people laughing behind our backs, was on high alert for this sort of criticism and would do anything it could to stop me from writing again. I haven't sought out and read a review or a tweet since.
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It's about a young man who has climbed to fame and he discovers that his writing and the relationship with his wife are really more important for him than anything else.
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I started writing in the '90s, so I was free to just have an eccentric career and not conform to some idea of what a black writer has to do. I didn't have the burden of representation.
Colson Whitehead -
Sometimes writers of no talent at all can write great acting scenes. Sometimes the very best writers can't write scenes that come to life.
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If I haven't anything to write, I am just as anxious to 'take my pen in hand' as though I had a message to deliver, a cause to plead, or a problem to unfold. Nothing but writing rests me; only then do I seem completely myself!
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Nothing trains you better to write fiction than being really good at writing about your own interiority.
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Writing is hard work: it is like doing homework for the rest of your life. You are always chipping away at it.
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When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.
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More or less the first thing that comes into my head is that some people are always looking for what they want to do in life and never finding it. I'm not one of those people. It has been very obvious to me from an early age who I am, and this has been tied up with creativity, and, specifically, with writing.
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Cast aside any column about two subjects. It means the pundit chickened out on the hard decision about what to write about that day.
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I can write for any magazine now, in any voice. I can do it in two hours, I could do it in my sleep, it's like writing a grocery list.
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I've always expressed myself best through writing. I've gotten out all of my deepest feelings that way for as long as I can remember.
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You can be whoever you want to be when you are writing songs.
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Whenever I'm writing a book, small details from my life always creep in.
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There came this point where I sat down with all my notebooks and I had to start to write, when I thought: this whole notion of writing for the person who understands nothing, the average reader... He has to die! I can't have him in my head. And so the person I started writing for was the homicide detective.
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He capers, he dances, he has eyes of youth, he writes verses, he speaks holiday, he smells April and May.
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The best style of writing, as well as the most forcible, is the plainest.
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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.
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It has gone past me now, the writing phase.
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When you're writing - when I'm writing anyway - I'm writing out of different kinds of preoccupations and obsessions, different forms of drivenness, and so you're really hostage those while writing. I am, anyway. And it's only when you finally take the finished thing out of the furnace that you see what it was that went into the making of the thing.
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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.
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Writing is like fishing. You don't bow because you made the fish. That's the difference. If you know that, then you bow for your labor.You crafted, you worked, you put in those hours so that you could catch that fish. But you didn't make that fish. You just caught the fish. That will help you stay humble and bow for the right reason and be very lucid about the work you do.
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When you're writing with an artist or for an artist, you have to help them serve their vision. That's the cool part about writing songs. There are no rules.
