Writing Quotes
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When I started 'Still Missing,' I had a few key plot points in mind, which I played around with mentally for a couple of months, then one day I just started writing. Not having an outline led to some cool plot twists, but also many rewrites! A lot of the plotting happened on subsequent drafts.
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When I was 13, I started writing songs, and it fell into my lap all of a sudden. I wrote poems and journals, but that's when it switched for me to songwriting. That's when I wanted to do everything. It was like a fire all of a sudden. I started coming to Nashville and moved here when I was 15.
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Like the child, the creative writing student is posited as a centre of vulnerable creativity, needful of attention and authority.
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I guess what led to me writing 'Holes' was having moved to Texas in 1991, and it was sort of my reaction to Texas.
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I wrote small stories here and there, then bigger ones. Some were even written for money. I signed up for a writing class and snuck my first assignment on a yellow legal pad in a partner's office while he read through my memo.
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I always wanted to be a writer. Maybe, had I been brought up in another generation, I might have just gone into writing rather than medicine - which is not to say that I didn't also have a great attraction towards the idea of being a healer. Fortunately, I've been able to combine the two in ways I could never possibly have imagined.
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Poetry is the most intimate of all writing. I want to speak first from me to myself and then from me to you.
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You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.
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I was going to go to college and graduate and move to New York and do the Broadway thing. That's where a lot of my influences vocally and writing come from. Then I did some covers, and towards the end of college, I saw it was a path I could take. I wrote more pop music.
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I had a great conversation with Trent Reznor. Trent said, "I'd have a sixpack, too, if I didn't write my own music!"
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I literally left school and went straight into music via art college for a year, and I've been so involved in my job of writing songs that the more actively involved part became channeled into standing on the stage and saying things that way.
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A writer is not a prophet, is not a philosopher; he's just someone who is witness to what is around him. And so writing is a way to... it's the best way to testify, to be a witness.
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Novels are my favorite to write and read. I do like writing personal essays, too. I'm not really a short story writer, nor do I tend to gravitate to them as a reader.
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Short fiction is like low relief. And if your story has no humor in it, then you're trying to look at something in the pitch dark. With the light of humor, it throws what you're writing into relief so that you can actually see it.
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In writing lyrics - well, for me, anyway - it's about getting into character, you know? 'Who is writing this?' In the case of the original 'Thick As A Brick,' supposedly a precocious, very young child who's fantasizing about his future and the context of all the confusing elements to which school boys are subjected at that time.
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I make a point of writing, if only a little, every day, as a kind of discipline so that it is not a whim but a piece of work.
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When I was writing for children, I was writing genre fiction. It was like making a good chair. It needed four legs of the same length, it had to be the right height and it had to be comfortable.
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I know that song writing is probably the most mystical of the things that I do, in a sense that I'm not sure where it came from or how it started. It's something that I just knew how to do. It's something that just happens.
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I continue to enjoy looking for stories, and trying to do the best job I can reporting and writing them.
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People often lump radio and television together because they are both broadcast mediums. But radio, anyway, and the radio I do for NPR, is much closer to writing than it is to television.
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I'm just writing, writing, writing. I keep these tablets on me until I'm inspired to go back in and make the music. I never take a break from my pen, because I pride myself on that.
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The first person who showed me that I could be a maker of music was one of my best friends. It's like, you can't see yourself doing something until you see somebody else doing it. Other people were encouraging me singing, but this was the first time that I could see myself writing songs and playing guitar.
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...I have this scar on my hand (points to shoulder). I see a lot of these guys who come with scars on their hands. It’s ridiculous. With me it was an accident. These kids do it on purpose. You can’t prove by doing such things that you are the biggest fan there is. I am myself thinking about getting a plastic surgery done to remove this. I also get a lot of people writing to me with their blood. I have stopped replying to those mails altogether.
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I'm a huge fan of writing for people rather than writing and then trying to wedge people in. I'd love to know who the people are before I can write for them. For me, it's a much more organic way to create characters.
