Writing Quotes
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I love to write. I have always loved writing. That was my first love.
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I think some authors suffer from a need to try to prove that they're clever and educated. I try not to suffer from that. I would rather sacrifice my own narrative in the exercise of writing a biography. So I'm not worried about whether I'm clever.
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I think when you're writing from your own life, it's hard because you realize that people have their own assessment of how they look, and they don't know how you will describe them.
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I got a job writing for a financial technology newsletter in Manhattan. I didn't even understand what I was writing about. The newsletter had, like, 2,000 subscribers, and it was $700 a year for a subscription.
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I think it's great some hotels provide stationery. Because the first thing I like to do when I get to a hotel room is write a letter. "My dearest Gwendolyn, I arrived by nightfall at the Embassy Suites. It will be a fortnight after my return that this letter shall arrive. Allow me to explain the curious charge at the ledger. It is because I miss thee so much, darling, I accidentally ordered Sorrority Sisters 7."
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Research is all well and good, but I definitely enjoy writing the most. I will happily sit at my computer and work on a single paragraph for hours. And there's no better feeling than when your writing is going well.
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I think that whether you've just begun writing or whether you've been writing for fifty years - I mean, I'm excited to get there and tell you about it when I do - I think that there's always the challenge of believing in yourself enough to get the work done and not being so taken with yourself that you're unwilling to continue to work on the work.
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I'm much faster now. When you only have a certain amount of time to write, after a while you learn to use your time well or you stop writing.
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I would love to produce a film. I have written a script and am in the process of writing another, so maybe it will happen down the road. I would love to do a film in Africa.
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I wanted to be an artist. I was studying art. I wanted to be a great painter. When I went into the Navy, there wasn't much to draw at sea. So I began writing, and I began reading a lot.
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Writing is the only way I know to demand justice from an uncaring universe.
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I always felt that my way into comedy would be through my writing rather than my acting.
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It wasn't a leap for me to go from not wanting to be in my body as a teenager, not wanting to be in my house, to thinking, 'What would happen if I had disappeared?' And then going from writing scenes of angry kids to thinking a little more about the parents and what their lives would be like.
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Writing is very much like bricklaying. You learn to put one brick on top of another and spread the mortar so thick.
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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.
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I have this feeling of wending my way or plundering through a mysterious jungle of possibilities when I am writing. This jungle has not been explored by previous writers. It never will be explored. It's endlessly varying as we progress through the experience of time. These words that occur to me come out of my relation to the language which is developing even as I am using it.
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I'm not a professional; I lack even basic knowledge about writing music.
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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 started writing 'Brick Lane' when my children were two years and five months old. We were on holiday in the north of England when I was overtaken by a compulsion to start writing.
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Anybody who can write home for money can write for magazines.
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I don't think I'm interested in writing women's novels anymore.
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I've been writing joke songs since I was a kid and it served me well at S.N.L. I can write those in my sleep. In fact, I have.
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No blur of inexactness, no cloud of vagueness, is allowable in good writing; from the first seeing to the last putting down, there must be steady lucidity and uncompromise of purpose.
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Read Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande. Then do what it says, including the tasks you think are impossible. You will particularly hate the advice to write first thing in the morning, but if you can manage it, it might well be the best thing you ever do for yourself. This book is about becoming a writer from the inside out. Many later advice manuals derive from it. You don't really need any others, though if you want to boost your confidence, "how to" books seldom do any harm. You can kick-start a whole book with some little writing exercise.
