Writing Quotes
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In fact, quite a lot of what I do has to do with sound texture, and, you can't notate that. You can't notate the sound of "St. Elmo's Fire." There's no way of writing that down. That's because musical notation arose at a time when sound textures were limited. If you said violins and woodwind that defined the sound texture; if I say synthesizer and guitar it means nothing - you're talking about 28,000 variables.
Brian Eno
Roxy Music
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Journalism is very much public writing, writing with an audience in mind, writing for publication, and frequently writing quickly. And I know that when I worked daily journalism it really affected my patience with literature, which I think requires reflection, and a different kind of engagement.
Achy Obejas
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There are certain things that I know I don't want to do anymore. Playing out-and-out terrorists who terrorise people and don't actually move the conversation on are not worth doing. So that's probably another reason I don't go back to America, because a lot of it is like that. It's boring, dull, very lazy writing.
Art Malik
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The first thing I tried to write was a novel, when I took that time off in grad school. Then I didn't finish it. I went back to school, and then I started writing nonfiction kind of by accident.
Elif Batuman
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I'm very secretive. I'll write a whole novel and revise it, which might take me two years or more, and the people I know best don't know what I'm writing about.
Alice Mattison
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Photographers direct the eye toward a particular object. We who write, one hopes, are directing the heart and the soul.
Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni, Jr.
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Writing a Metallica song is a journey and a process, and it takes time, but that's what's special about it.
Robert Trujillo
Metallica
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After the first shock of recognition - a sudden sense of "this is what I'm going to write" - the novel starts to breed by itself; the process goes on solely in the mind, not on paper. I feel a kind of gentle development, an uncurling inside, and I know that the details are there already, that in fact I would see them plainly if I looked closer, but I prefer to wait until what is loosely called inspiration has completed the task for me.
Vladimir Nabokov
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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.
William Morris Hunt
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They’re writing what we’re all living, you ’d have to be blind, deaf and dumb not to see the drama in the humanitarian crisis in the Middle East.
Alex Gansa
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I'm not going to tell people how to write, but we do have a skill set, and the more we put ourselves out into the world as poets, as a sort of poet of the tribe, as representatives of metaphor, and try to claim space for metaphor in the inner life, that's going to be important and be helpful to poetry and bring a tension for poets writing about whatever they choose.
David Biespiel
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I actually do write very emotionally, because it’s not going to make it out of the rough draft process if I’m not moved by the premise of what I’m writing.
Nick Waterhouse
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If you want to "get in touch with your feelings," fine, talk to yourself. We all do. But if you want to communicate with another thinking human being, get in touch with your thoughts. Put them in order, give them a purpose, use them to persuade, to instruct, to discover, to seduce. The secret way to do this is to write it down, and then cut out the confusing parts.
William Lewis Safir
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When you're writing a sketch, it has to be surrounded by a situation. It can't just be out of the air.
Leslie Jones
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To some extent the shorter the writing assignment is, the harder it is to accomplish, and a blurb is 200 words max. Blurbs are meaningless, and actual people who are buying the books don't care about them at all.
Emily Gould
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I started writing in my 20s. I just wanted to write, but I didn't have anything to write about, so in the beginning, I wrote entertainments - mainly murder mysteries.
Alan Furst