Writing Quotes
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What a woman says to an eager lover, write it on running water, write it on air.
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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.
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I started writing for the theatre because I hated it.
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There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
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When I write something, it's usually 'cause I think it's funny or I have a way in, but when I direct something, I really need to be close to it.
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If you're writing a thriller, and you don't make it compelling, then you've really not done your job. So it's easier for me not to set out with certain goals, and then I can't see them as unmet. It's like life generally: If I'm not aiming to be physically fit, then I'm not always thinking about being unfit.
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I think everything you are, everything that engages you, eventually comes to bear on the novel you write. I think the creative energy in novel writing, obviously, comes from tension. From trying to fuse. From trying to make coherent disparate things that might not at all seem to belong together within a narrative.
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When writing about transcendental issues, be transcendentally clear.
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Novelists are no more moral or certain than anybody else; we are ideologically adrift, and if we are any good then our writing will live in several places at once. That is both our curse and our charm.
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I have always used emotion as a writing tool. That goes back to me being on the stage.
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You've got to be smart enough to write and stupid enough to not think about all the things that might go wrong.
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There is a big difference between being lonely and being alone. I am alone when I write, but I am rarely lonely.
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I keep a journal, and every day I write down one great play that I had that day. I don't write down any negatives.
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By the end of the writing process, which is about 80 songs per album, I look at the material and think, what's going to make a difference in someone's life.
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To be honest, that whole exchange with Crunk Feminist actually made me write the song because I realize there's a lot of young women out there so hurt by the misogynistic images in hip-hop they paint it with such a broad brush stroke that they think anybody that defends hip-hop is defending misogyny.
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Aside from a brief stint as a writing tutor during graduate school, I have managed to avoid respectable employment all my adult life.
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I spend a huge amount of time writing about the book instead of writing the actual text.
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Good God! This man should be writing dime novels.
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Writing is the great invention of the world.
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The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.
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There are reviews that are clearly wrong. Dr. Johnson's famous Life of Savage, he's clearly wrong about the value of Savage. But it's one of the great works in English literature. You can learn more about the artistic expression and what the poet does and how to write about art from that than any number of guys who are terrible writers, who have no original ideas, but who say yes, "Hamlet" is a wonderful play. It's a meaningless statement.
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If you're rich, you can leave a library, a building, or a hospital wing. But writing leaves behind a visceral sense of what it was like to be alive on the planet in a particular time. Writing tells us what it meant for someone to be human.
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Just writing and being in the studio was like therapy for me.
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I've used pseudonyms for various reasons. In my earliest days I was writing too much, and needed to shift some of the product over to other front men. I've also done it to establish the different tones of the different writings: Stark doesn't write very much like Westlake at all.
