Writing Quotes
-
Modern literary theory sees a similarity between walking and writing that I find persuasive: words inscribe a text in the same way that a walk inscribes space. In The practicse of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau writes, 'The act of walking is a process of appropriation of the topographical system on the part of the pedestrian; it is a special acting-out of the place...and it implies relations among differentiated positions.' I think this is a fancy way of saying that writing is one way of making the world our own, and that walking is another.
-
I don't feel like I'm writing music for gay people. I'm a gay man who is writing music about one tiny little experience of what it's like to be a human on this planet.
-
It was such a paradox for me that the only thing I know how to do is act, but that the first thing I abandoned while writing were the characters.
-
The hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn, and anybody is cheating who takes politics as a way out. All the outs are too easy, and the thing itself is too hard to do.
-
Water is the ink that writes the poetry of life.
-
There is a feminist proverb I learned from my mother: The personal is political. There's a powerful literary stereotype that men write about war and politics and public life, while women confine themselves to family and food and personal life.
-
It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them. The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page.
-
I think something many of us grapple with are those times we dread the practice of writing, no matter the project.
-
The difficulty in the way of writing a children's play is that Barrie was born too soon. Many people must have felt the same about Shakespeare. We who came later have no chance. What fun to have been Adam, and to have had the whole world of plots and jokes and stories at one's disposal.
-
Me and my wife were interested in avoiding style, in eliminating voice, in getting away from the poetry logics, textures, and propulsions that we normally employ in our writing. But we arrived at even this organically and separately.
-
I would recommend that any writer get off their ass at least once and just try it. Directing is a completely different set of muscles. It also affects your writing because, once you start directing, you tend to write your scripts with directing in mind.
-
Some may say [journal keeping] is a great deal of trouble. But we should not call anything trouble which brings to pass good. I consider that portion of my life which has been spent in keeping journals and writing history to have been very profitably spent. - "If there was no other motive in view [except] to have the privilege of reading over our journals and for our children to read, it would pay for the time spent in writing it.
-
Once I start writing about somebody, I become very protective of them.
-
I don't hire any companies or ask any of my friends to write reviews for me on Amazon when I have a book come out so they can drive up my ratings on Amazon. I don't have a publicist.
-
I write my novels longhand. I love the feeling of writing; I love to see pen on paper. It feels more creative than typing, and it's a more visual process for me - I can picture the entire scene in my head and am merely writing what I see.
-
If you have some other profession that allows you your evenings or weekends, terrific, stick with that. Having a profession other than writing also has the potential side benefit of providing you with material, something to write about.
-
Children should learn to draw as they learn to write, and such a mystery should not be made of it. They should be encouraged, not flattered... then [later in life] double the effort is required to get the facility which might have been gained insensibly.
-
I realized later how much my acting experience influenced my writing and how it helped me to write for other actors.
-
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.
-
I started out writing stories because that's all I wanted to read, but now I don't know if I'll ever write one again.
-
I'm not a critic so much of my own writing. People must make up their own minds over that.
-
I can only do really serious writing for a couple of hours. And then I always go on a walk. I do a one-to-two-hour walk; I don't go running or hard hiking.
-
I wanted to write about the third world and had the opportunity to go live in the trenches, so to speak.
-
One strange quality of writing about political campaigns is that it's a little like writing about a baseball game inning by inning. We presume we can say something about the final result from the state of play a third of the way through. You can when a game is a colossal blowout, but you can't when it's close.
