Writing Quotes
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All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.
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I was very happy sitting alone at a dining room table, writing a script.
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The joy of writing. The power of preserving. Revenge of a mortal hand.
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I'm always writing; my phone is full of ideas - melodies and lyrics and stuff.
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When I'm writing fiction, I'm sort of interested by the fact that somehow or other I can have the feeling of actually seeing things through someone else's eyes.
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Writing is hard. I mean, I sit there and work at it.
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If you could stop every atom in its position and direction, and if your mind could comprehend all the actions thus suspended, then if you were really, really good at algebra you could write the formula for all the future; and although nobody can be so clever as to do it, the formula must exist just as if one could.
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Good writing is good conversation, only more so.
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Keep your mouth shut and see what's happening around you. Don't finish people's sentences for them. Don't just hear what they say, but also how they behave while they're saying it. That was great training for writing.
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The only one who doesn't make mistakes is the one who doesn't do anything.
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You aren't really writing about what you did; you're writing about how you feel.
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At the top of the cycle you write policies for everybody, no matter how bad, and at the bottom you cancel everybody, no matter how good. It's a manic-depressive cycle.
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I've been writing, but I haven't been writing. In my mind I've been saying I want to write, but I haven't actually physically picked up a pencil and started writing.
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Novelists do not write as birds sing, by the push of nature. It is part of the job that there should be much routine and some daily stuff on the level of carpentry.
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Writing a film is like giving birth to a baby and then giving it up for adoption.
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I've not been a prolific poet, and it always seemed to me to be a bad idea to feel that you had to produce in order to get... credits. Production of a collection of poems every three years or every five years, or whatever, looks good, on paper. But it might not be good; it might be writing on a kind of automatic pilot.
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It's absolutely fatal to your writing to think about how your work will be received. It's a betrayal of whatever talent you have.
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Restaurant critics all struggle with the difficulty of writing about eating without resorting to the word 'delicious' and its synonyms.
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The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading
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I left things out - my motivations, my history, my emotional responses - because I am not good at understanding them or writing about them. I tried and it was generally boring and always unconvincing. Most importantly I wanted to try to place Afghans and Afghanistan in the foreground rather than my own character.
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Scripts were rather scarce in 1968. We did a lot of Amiri Baraka's plays, the agitprop stuff he was writing. It was at a time when black student organizations were active on the campuses, so we were invited to the colleges around Pittsburgh and Ohio, and even as far away as Jackson, Mississippi.
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Every time I write a song, it's different. I'm all about the rhythm of the words and the melody. Musically, you gotta have a throbbing pulse going. But as far as what it's all about, there's a million ways to go. You have to invent a new code for every song. Then you have to break it. It's like Scrabble or a crossword puzzle on steriods. I could talk about the process for days. But it's never dull and there's no one way in.
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I love writing essays and articles, so it's hard for me to resist taking assignments that inevitably pull me away from larger projects.
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Depending on what I'm working on, I come to the writing desk with entirely different mindsets. When I change form one to the other, it's as if another writer is on the scene.
