Writing Quotes
-
The writing I have in mind and sometimes indulge in myself is concerned, not with plants, mountains or birds as items of scientific description, but with experiences of nature that impinge upon our moods and emotions, enrich our imagination and reveries, and shape our sense of how we stand in relation to the environing world. In a broad sense of the term, this kind of writing is an exercise in phenomenology, an attempt to render the significance that birds, plants or whatever have for us.
-
In writing the autobiography, I can really chuckle when I look at the songs. I was acting out the part. I saw myself as a victim.
-
It was an interesting thing to do. Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of the pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message; I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions.
-
I realized later how much my acting experience influenced my writing and how it helped me to write for other actors.
-
You're going to write straight and simple and good now. That's the start.''What if I'm not straight and simple and good? Do you think I can write that way?''Write how you are but make it straight.
-
The ideas for stories that thronged my brain would not let me rest till I had got rid of them by writing them.
-
I think a melody is a melody. And the way I usually start is I start writing my themes without even writing to picture to just try to find the tone for the movie or the TV show.
-
I start with the subject matter I want to write about. Then I make a musical base for that and create an atmosphere with the music. Once I've done that, the lyrics come last.
-
Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.
-
I love to read. But I loved to read a lot longer than I started to love writing.
-
One [of the two ideas for PROOF] was to write about two sisters who are quarreling over the legacy of something left behind by their father. The other was about someone who knew that her parent had had problems of mental illness [and that] she might be going through the same thing.
-
I started writing when I was about thirteen.
-
If you write a piece, it's a different thing to show it to an editor than it is to show it to your best friend. You think, "Maybe she'll see through this or she'll see through that." That happened to me with my best friend back in Vancouver. I showed him "Just a Dream" and he took off the headphones halfway through and said, "Man, this is kind of garbage." He told me I needed to get singing lessons.
-
If you're writing a novel, you're in a room for three or four years. There's not much coming in from the outside.
-
Let people return to making knots on ropes, instead of writing.
-
A common and usually unfortunate answer is “Write about what you know.” Nothing can be more limiting to the imagination, nothing is quicker to turn on the psyche's censoring devices and distortion systems, than trying to write truthfully.
-
If I'm doing something I know I can pull off, then that's not the book I should be writing.
-
I don't really think of these as projects. I think of them as bands. I have tried to not just convene a group of musicians and make one record or make one gig and just drop it. Each of them develop over time. I have been really fortunate to keep a band like the Sextet together over three very different albums. Each time, the goal got more deep for me in terms of how I wanted to write for those people. So it is really about trying to develop ideas and trying to have a consistent focus on a way to come up with new ideas in music that I want to do.
-
When I am writing, even though it's hard and I do struggle often, I am happier than when I'm not writing. I feel alive. Whereas when I'm not writing, I feel like your common every-day neurotic.
-
We've got a bunch of new writers now who tell me they grew up watching The Simpsons. It's bizarre, and they're writing some very funny stuff.
-
Writing is storytelling and all of us are authors, not just of words but of reality. You are the author of your life, so go out and live! Then never quit writing about it!
-
All my writing takes place during the recording of the master tapes. I never do have songs when I start up an album. I actually write them while I record.
-
Obviously all writers, all artists, have their own internal critics; as they write they are being self-critical.
-
I've been approached many times to write all sorts of books about my past and my personal life. I get interest from people who want to do reality shows, and somebody just offered me a huge amount of money to write my spiritual memoirs. I'm just not interested.
