Writing Quotes
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If you imagine the world listening, you'll never write a line. That's why privacy is so important. You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone.
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I think you write only out of a great trouble. A trouble of excitement, a trouble of enlargement, a trouble of displacement in yourself.
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I block out a good amount of time - could be 6 or 8 months - and I just write. I do a lot of traveling, and I do a lot of co-writing with different writers just to start getting ideas out and kind of get a little bit of direction as far as where I'm going to go with the album.
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I see my writing as the process of looking at the usual, but from two steps to the side.
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I've realized that I can't multitask in the writing department; I can only kind of do one thing at a time.
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And I do pay a lot of attention to how things feel underneath my feet. It's a way of transporting yourself somewhere that you're trying to write about - closing your eyes and imagining what it feels like to literally be in that space. Maybe because of this weird aura thing I find it a bit easier to put my body in an imaginary space.
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When I devoted myself to poetry - and poetry is a very serious medium - I don't think the people that knew me as an individual with that tongue-in-cheek kind of humor...well, it didn't always lend itself to my poetry. When you're writing poetry, it's like working with gold, you can't waste anything. You have to be very economical with each word you're going to select. But when you're writing fiction, you can just go on and on; you can be more playful. My editor's main task is to cut back, not ask for more.
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Writing is one of the few professions left where you take all the responsibility for what you do. It's really dangerous and ultimately destroys you as a writer if you start thinking about responses to your work or what your audience needs.
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I love YA, and it's been a really good fit for me. But at some point, I would like to try something else: a collection of short stories, or writing about something other than high school. A lot has happened to me since I was eighteen.
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It is my writing dilemma. The world of spying is my genre. My struggle is to demystify, to de-romanticise the spook world, but at the same time harness it as a good story.
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When I'm writing a song, I'm just making stuff up as I go along.
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I'm a novelist. I'm not a crusader, and I'm not an editorial writer. And I'm not writing fiction to convince anybody of anything.
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The form I most enjoy writing is the sonnet or sonnet-like forms, where you have a - you know, three stanzas or two stanzas that lead into a concluding couplet.
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When writing fantastical literature, your biggest problem is getting your audience to believe the fantastical elements of your story.
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It's funny because my main awkwardness around writing the song had little to do with the method.
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You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.
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With writing, there are multiple drafts. On stage, there is one take. I do a lot of preparation for shows, so, for the most part, what you hear me say is pretty much what I wanted to get at.
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People ask, 'What are the scientific questions you're going to answer?' New Horizons doesn't have any of those; it's purely about raw exploration... We're not 'rewriting the textbook' - we're writing the textbook from scratch.
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I do play the guitar, but I do it for fun. And I am terrible at writing music as well. I have tried and failed, horribly.
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The elements I need to write are a place, a desk, a familiar room. I need some of my books there, I need quiet. ... I'm picturing as I'm writing. I'm putting together what I need to have this thing alive.
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All the characters on the album are inside me, though none are me. They are sides of me or who I was.
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Almost without exception, everything society has considered a social advance has been prefigured first in some utopian writing.
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When I'm writing from a character's viewpoint, in essence I become that character; I share their thoughts, I see the world through their eyes and try to feel everything they feel.
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I do not remember where I read that there are two kinds of poets: the good poets, who at a certain point destroy their bad poems and go off to run guns in Africa, and the bad poets, who publish theirs and keep writing more until they die.
