Writing Quotes
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Even while writing his book, he had become painfully aware how little he knew his own planet while attempting to piece together another one from jagged bits filched from deranged brains.
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For most of my writing life, I've refused to allow myself to believe that writing was a significant form of action. I always felt very uneasy about the fact that all I did was write in a situation as desperate as apartheid South Africa. Whether I was correct or not is a different issue.
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Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else
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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.
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Writing is a form of talking, although writing is such an odd thing in and of itself. People go about it in such different ways.
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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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I wanted to write about the third world and had the opportunity to go live in the trenches, so to speak.
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I'm a bit skeptical about the possibilities for resistant fiction, and even more despondent over the potential for politically engaged writing to do much of anything outside the dominant means of production and distribution.
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I find writing for children much easier. I don't mean it's less demanding - you've got to have a talent for it and you've got to work very hard - but you don't have to pull your guts out and lay them on the line in quite the same way as when you're writing for adults.
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There are a lot of composers who were fantastic, but I challenge them to write a record that you could play five times a day for two months on the radio, songs that people will want to dance to on a Saturday night.
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It seems to me now that the deep structures [in writing] are often subconscious and set in childhood.
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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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The fun of writing established characters is that there's a rich mythology to draw from - you get to play with toys you loved as a kid.
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Something good happened to my writing when I stopped being afraid to do something simple, for the fear that people might think I couldn't do something more complex. Don't be confused by the word simple. Simple is not easy, it is clear voiced, and fearlessly elegant.
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For stand-up comedians that go onstage and get to write and perform and direct, and do all these things, the allure of a television show is still there but if it doesn't offer a level of creative fulfillment, it's oddly unappealing.
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Pittsburgh was even more vital, more creative, more hungry for culture than New York. Pittsburgh was the birthplace of my writing.
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While medicine creates material for writing, perhaps even more important is that it also creates a psychological and emotional need to write.
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Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.
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When I think of folk music, I think of topical songs. And I don't write topical songs.
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You're always moving and thinking about a whole bunch of things. But those traits work well for me in studios and in meetings about creative ideas. If you listen to the songs I write, they are the most ADHD songs ever. They have five hooks in one and it all happens in three minutes. I figured out a way of working with it.
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In the early '90s, when I really started to find my voice, I was reading a lot of books, and I was moved by the writers, like Chinua Achebe, and I wanted to be able to write rhymes that were as potent as what I was reading.
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It is insight into human nature that is the key to the communicator's skill. For whereas the writer is concerned with what he puts into his writings, the communicator is concerned with what the reader gets out of it. He therefore becomes a student of how people read or listen.
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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.
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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.
