Writing Quotes
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I used to have a voice because I was interviewing people and writing, but as soon as I got swept up in the fashion world, I was just a pretty girl at a party wearing a pretty dress.
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I don't read as much as I'd like. I've been writing a lot. I've been doing a lot of music, but I don't read as much as I should. I just don't.
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You can write a great book and be ignored. Literary history is full of classics that were under-appreciated in their own time.
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I write out of enthusiasm. Momentum that comes from a new idea. Eagerness to explore. I also write out of fear - fear of losing an idea - fear of feeling stagnant.
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I imagine them very clearly and then attempt to describe what I can see. Sometimes I draw them for my own amusement! (talking about her characters and scenes)
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I was first introduced to Kafka's writing during my compulsory army-service basic training. During that period, Kafka's fiction felt hyperrealistic.
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Opinionated writing is always the most difficult... simply because it involves retaining in the cold morning-after crystal of the printed word the burning flow of molten feeling.
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By the age of nine I had a thorough knowledge of contemporary Polish literature as well as of foreign literature in Polish translation, and I began to write poems in honour of a lady of thirty years. Naturally, she knew nothing about them.
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If I am writing down something and it is my idea, my imagination, it won't be fact.
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If you have a craftsman's command of the language and basic writing techniques you'll be able to write - as long as you know what you want to say.
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I definitely feel like when I write a book it's not my job to police or guide the readers. The book and the characters don't belong to me anymore. If that makes sense.
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In America, where writers are preoccupied with the craft of writing, I always try to introduce this concept of the badly written good story. Turning the hierarchy around and putting passion on top and not craft, because when you just focus on craft, you can write something that is very sterile.
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Writing needs to be practiced; there is a limit to how much can be gleaned from a teacher or a manual. The true essence of writing is out there, in the world, and inside, within yourself. To write, you have to give.
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Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.
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With writing music and writing songs and recording music and coming up with stuff, you need to kind of reengage that kind of inner child to come up with interesting perceptions.
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When I began writing songs, there was a pretty direct line between what was happening in my life and what I wrote about. So my first album was really all about my failed attempts to make a particular relationship work.
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It's hard for me to just practice without writing something.
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The best style of writing, as well as the most forcible, is the plainest.
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Queen Latifah was writing poetry. Maybe Latifah's 'Ladies First' and Angelou's 'Phenomenal Woman' are the same thing, a generation apart.
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And out of a desire essentially to imitate what I was reading, I began to write, like a clever monkey.
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Busyness, I feel increasingly, is the writer's curse and downfall. You read too much and write too readily, you become cut off from your inner life, from the flow of your own thoughts, and turned far too much towards the outside world.
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Of course, like all organic processes, there is an ebb and a flow to writing. One does not exist without the other. The writer needs to be vigilant in protecting both, confident in the knowledge that the village will be there when we choose, finally, to open the door.
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I started to write in about 1950; I was thirty-five at the time; there didn't seem to be any strong motivation. I simply was endeavoring to put down in a more or less straightforward journalistic style something about my experiences with addiction and addicts.
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If it were a rainy day, a drunken vigil, a fit of the spleen, a course of physic, sleepy Sunday, an ill run at dice, a long tailor's bill, a beggar's purse, a factious head, a hot sun, costive diet, want of books, and a just contempt for learning - but for these. . .the number of authors and of writing would dwindle away to a degree most woeful to behold.
