Writing Quotes
-
When I wrote those first songs for the Truckers, songs like 'Outfit' and 'Decoration Day,' those were strong songs, very strong songs. But had I been in the position of writing an entire album at that point in time, I don't think the whole album would have been of that kind of quality.
-
Whenever I'm writing a book, small details from my life always creep in.
-
My favorite thing, maybe even more than going in and writing for myself because I've become bitter and jaded, is writing with an artist that has a perspective and that has a story to tell. It’s a really, really cool feeling and experience.
-
I find myself speaking through the other characters, putting ideas in their voices and heads. Writing almost becomes a splitting of myself into multiple personalities. But I don't write to make an argument on behalf of any of the characters, or to prove anything about a character. I think that's important that I be serving the story first and not my own point of view.
-
All the characters on the album are inside me, though none are me. They are sides of me or who I was.
-
To me, making a CD is like writing a book.
-
Never expect what you write to be any good, 'cause it's the fear of writing badly that stops you from finding the right words.
-
All the elements of good writing depend on the writer's skill in choosing one word instead of another.
-
There are always dimensions, and the way they get expressed is through the writing and the actors and the director you get to work with on that day. But there are always dimensions, outside of really basic stuff for very young people where it needs to be very clear.
-
Every writer I've ever spoken to feels fraudulent in some way or other.
-
I wanted to write something in a voice that was unique to who I was. And I wanted something that was accessible to the person who works at Dunkin Donuts or who drives a bus, someone who comes home with their feet hurting like my father, someone whos busy and has too many children, like my mother.
-
TV's not the problem, and I'm tired of it being posed as this antithesis to creativity and productivity. If TV's getting in your way of writing a book, then you don't want to write a book bad enough.
-
Trying to make your own sound is hard. When I was producing for other artists, I could just produce and write songs as a normal songwriter, and almost make them generic. The artists themselves, whoever is singing that song, can put their own twist on it. When it came to my own material, I had to really dig deep, because I was just writing generic stuff. It sounded like everybody else, like Justin Timberlake, like Usher. I never wanted to sound like someone, that's when you know it's not going to work.
-
I find it an easy way into writing pieces is to think what the character's voice is like, and start from there.
-
I think a conceptual idea comes to me first - something I've been mulling over a lot right before I feel like writing a book - and then the characters start to develop around it.
-
Doing an experiment is not more important than writing.
-
I had to appreciate other things about music, like the writing and the cadence and dealing with producers. I became a student. I wanted to learn the actual idea of what this industry was before I could creatively speak a lot of the things that I wanted to speak.
-
Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing.
-
Before I got my present job, I spent many years teaching writing part-time, so-called, at community colleges and universities. It's academia's version of migrant labor.
-
Mission Control will be perfect. When you leave this meeting today you will go to your office and the first thing you will do there is to write "Tough and Competent" on your blackboards. It will never be erased. Each day when you enter the room these words will remind you of the price paid by Grissom, White, and Chaffee. These words are the price of admission to the ranks of Mission Control.
-
I learned that I enjoy directing a lot more than I enjoy writing, which is interesting, because writing is lonely and infamous basically.
-
There was a time when hip-hop was its own musical principle, aside from sampling. Like the entire Wild Style break is instrumental. Kurtis Blow's earliest stuff was studio musicians playing. Whodini had a real clear sound, things like "five minutes of funk," stuff that you could write really beautiful, lush string and horn arrangements around, stuff that was just music.
-
If I don't feel like writing on a certain day, I just go to the cafe and hang around.
-
I don't keep any copy of my books around... they would embarass me. When I finish writing my books, I kick them in the belly, and have done with them.
