Writing Quotes
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When I started writing, I said, 'I don't know how to do this. I don't know if it sounds good.' Coming from being an underdog or being told that something wasn't for you over and over repeatedly, it took a lot out of me. It took a lot of my self-confidence.
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Writing fiction has always, for me, been an alchemy of turning pain into poetry, ugliness into beauty. It has been a kind of redemption.
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A writer is like a bag lady going through life with a sack and a pointed stick collecting stuff.
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Everybody wants to write a hit song, but in Nashville people want to write the best song, which was my original intention as a singer/songwriter.
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I think I'm funnier in my writing than in person.
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I realized later how much my acting experience influenced my writing and how it helped me to write for other actors.
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Beware of advice. Consider your sources carefully. Look them up. See if you respect what they've made. Get educated. Be informed about who's real and who isn't. Study your craft and your industry, practice all the time, challenge yourself - write things you think you can't, try things you have been told you shouldn't try - leave room for surprises, and learn how to collaborate.
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I had decided to be a magician well before I decided to be a writer. I was the little boy who would get up on-stage and do magic wearing a fake mustache, which would fall off during the performance. I'm still trying to perform those tricks. Now I do it with writing.
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I wrote a book. It sucked. I wrote nine more books. They sucked, too. Meanwhile, I read every single thing I could find on publishing and writing, went to conferences, joined professional organizations, hooked up with fellow writers in critique groups, and didn't give up. Then I wrote one more book.
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I get the ideas from everything. Children sometimes think you have to have special experiences to write, but good writing brings out what's special in ordinary things.
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Writing is a form of mischief.
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I've known several cases of writers who decide to write about something and they research the hell out of it and when they're ready to write, they can't move because they are so burdened. I start writing. Whatever I need somehow comes to hand.
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When I write in the studio, I tend to gravitate toward the ability to play really loud, aggressive, post-punk stuff, with big, heavy guitars and a big rock drum sound.
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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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It's a mystical quality of music, that music isn't really concrete, and it's communicating abstractions about imaginary worlds. At least, my music's like that. It's not real. It's unreal, it's all fabrication. To write a song about Obama would suddenly break the spell.
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I think when people hear about a celebrity writing a book of any kind, the assumption is that it was dictated to a ghostwriter.
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I've just finished a series of Olivia Manning novels. She's best known for two trilogies: Balkan Trilogy and Levant Trilogy. The six novels are continuous and contain the same set of characters. They are based on Manning's experiences in Eastern Europe and Egypt during the Second World War. Each novel is a wonderful picture of the peculiar British expatriate culture and what was happening during the war. She's one of those brilliant women who write very well about domestic relationships. All the books are slim, and it's easy to gallop through them.
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I'm used to writing stories with a beginning a middle and an end in four minutes.
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Neither Christ nor Buddha nor Socrates wrote a book, for to do so is to exchange life for a logical process.
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I've been very blessed to make a living in stuff I love and am totally passionate about, music and writing. So I'm eager to see what the day will bring, how I will feed that passion.
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When even your fans are writing to tell you to get a life, you know you need to listen.
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If you're writing a detective novel or horror or sci-fi, you want to expand or reinvigorate the genre in your own little way.
Colson Whitehead -
Sporadic thoughts will pop into my head and I'll have to go write something down, and the next thing you know, I've written a whole song in an hour.
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Writing is a form of self-flagellation.
