Writing Quotes
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When I'm writing, I'm thinking about how the songs are going to play live. Fifty bars of rap don't translate onstage. No matter how potent the music, you lose the crowd. They want a hook; they want to sing your stuff back to you.
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You love writing; I hate it; and if I had a lover who expected a note from me every morning, I should certainly break with him. Let me beg you then not to measure my friendship by my writing.
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Ceaseless work, analysis, reflection, writing much, endless self-correction, that is my secret.
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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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Through the misguided notion that writing about flying was easy, I had McCone become a pilot. When I learned that research in books wasn't enough, I forced myself to take lessons.
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I can't even imagine writing nonfiction by hand. I think if I didn't have a computer, I just couldn't do it. Maybe it's a brain-section issue.
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Good writing is about finding and exploiting anecdotes that resonate with the reader. In storytelling, it's OK if you only make one point, as long as it's a good one.
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I probably had something to do with being southern. For some reason, over the last few years I've been much more conscious of that. It's probably because my friend Jack Womack has a thesis that he and I write the way we do because we're southern and we experienced the very tail end of the premeditated south.
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I am writing to you in the hope that the conflict in Vietnam can be brought to an end. That conflict has already taken a heavy toll-in lives lost, in wounds inflicted, in property destroyed, and in simple human misery. If we fail to find a just and peaceful solution, history will judge us harshly.
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The thing that makes vivid writing is when the reader is in the body of the story, the body of the character. Things smell like something; there's weather, there's texture, there's light.
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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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The Age of Writing has passed. We must invent a new metaphor, restructure our thoughts and feelings. (p. 14)
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I didn't think about whether I was writing poems. I was thinking. And the more I was thinking, the more there was I didn't understand.
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Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.
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I find it hard to think of myself as selling books. I don't even have a Web site. I want to sit and write, not sell.
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The best writing has no lace on its sleeves.
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I've been very blessed to make a living in stuff I love and am totally passionate about, music and writing. So I'm eager to see what the day will bring, how I will feed that passion.
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When I write, the story is always uppermost in my mind, and I feel that everything must be sacrificed to it. All elegant passages, all the curious details, all the so-called beautiful writing - if they are not truly relevant to what I am trying to say, then they have to go.
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A writer is like a bag lady going through life with a sack and a pointed stick collecting stuff.
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I write stories about conspiracies and paranoid characters while I am, in fact, a very skeptical person.
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I always love writing about children.
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The fact that my students could be in a little college in a little college town on the coast of Rhode Island, and be connecting in other countries with other people, did open them up and empower them and their sense of being. Whether it affected their writing, it's hard to tell.
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I can't really see myself writing about politics because I'm not really into it, and one of the worst things you can do is write about things you're not into.
