Writing Quotes
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I began my writing career in a very isolated place and time.
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The liberal arts are the arts of communication and thinking. 'They are the arts indispensable to further learning, for they are the arts of reading, writing, speaking, listening, figuring.
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The only thing better than good English writing is - I can't think of anything. You just don't pour it pureed over your potatoes. You savor it as if it were a find chardonnay. What on Earth does it matter if you stop and repeat a phrase, roll it around on your tongue, dart a few lines ahead and then suddenly come back and reread it? If the phrase is good enough, you are supposed to stop and rejoice in it.
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Writing is easy. Just sit down and open a vein.
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I'm truly an outsider in the poetry world. When I started writing, I was trying to move my poems away from modernist lines.
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Once I had started, I discovered the secret pleasure of writing a novel. It's such an immersive, deep commitment. With short stories, you're continually having to start again from scratch, but with a novel you only need one good idea every few years.
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I really like Los Angeles. I like the weather, the openness of it, the beach, the mountains, the desert. I find it inspiring. I get quite a lot of writing done out there.
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Unlike a typical professional, I can't quit my job to become a full-time author; I don't have that luxury. For me, writing is therapy; if I choose to write full-time, it might start feeling like work.
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I LOVE Taylor Swift's 1989. I think it's really cool at the moment that the production on her record is just as strong as the writing. I like the fact that the early nineties sound seems to have come back around.
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Years ago, when my attempts at a writing career came to a complete stand-still, I applied to the Los Angeles Police Department. This might seem odd for a liberal woman who once went to UC Santa Cruz, but I've always had a powerful fascination with crime and serious interest in finding different ways to contend with it.
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Writing for somebody else is really fun 'cause I consider myself a songwriter first and foremost.
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Writing went from being a calling to being a job. Business ruined things. It became like making sausages in a sausage factory.
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I was under twenty when I deliberately put it to myself one night after good conversation that there are moments when we actually touch in talk what the best writing can only come near. The curse of our book language is not so much that it keeps forever to the same set phrases . . . but that it sounds forever with the same reading tones. We must go out into the vernacular for tones that haven't been brought to book.
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“Writing succeeds at whatever it does in spite of the sparseness of its means relative to the worlds evoked.”
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My preference is for really good writing, and I just really don't care where it is.
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Writing is sometimes a balancing act between keeping things easily readable and being accurate.
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Suspense arises naturally from good writing - it's not a spice to be added separately.
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My Irish Catholic mother loved romantic movies, provided they ended with a kiss before the screen went dark. If things went any further than that, she'd complain, Why can't they leave something to the imagination? I sort of subscribe to her philosophy when it comes to writing sex.
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The way I write is really like putting one foot in front of the other. I really let the characters do most of the work, they start talking and they just lead the way.
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I would agree with that. But when I write lyrics, personally I don't care if the person who is listening to it understands what I'm saying or not; and I write them like that specifically. You know, I have my views; I don't feel the need to have people have the same views as me. So if they find the meaning in the songs and it's the same meaning as the one I intended then fine and dandy and if they don't, they don't.
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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.
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A writer is in the broadest sense a spokesman of his community. Through him that community comes to know its heart. Without such knowledge, how long can it survive?
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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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I find it an easy way into writing pieces is to think what the character's voice is like, and start from there.
