Writing Quotes
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I don't want to be on a soapbox, but I feel like a lot of documentary filmmakers are part of the ancient tradition of writing down notes, of saying, 'Hey people, hey people!'
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It was such a paradox for me that the only thing I know how to do is act, but that the first thing I abandoned while writing were the characters.
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The best writing is certainly when you are in love
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When I'm writing, I'm thinking about how the songs are going to play live. Fifty bars of rap don't translate onstage. No matter how potent the music, you lose the crowd. They want a hook; they want to sing your stuff back to you.
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Writing is like fishing. You don't bow because you made the fish. That's the difference. If you know that, then you bow for your labor.You crafted, you worked, you put in those hours so that you could catch that fish. But you didn't make that fish. You just caught the fish. That will help you stay humble and bow for the right reason and be very lucid about the work you do.
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One of the hardest things about writing lyrics is to make the lyrics sit on the music in such a way that you're not aware there was a writer there.
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Ideas are like dreams; they will disappear unless we record them. Write a book, a blog, build a company, anything that makes the ideas real.
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If you're still wondering about details - how am I going to get these two to meet, or whatever - when you're writing, you can't pay proper attention to the sentences themselves.
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From a guitar player's point of view it's generally harder writing parts to songs than finding a part to base a song on.
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I don't answer the phone or do my email; I don't do anything until I've got the day's writing done. I have a word count for every day: 500 for fiction, 1,000 for non-fiction, and journalism is 1,500. That's a level I can sustain.
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You're looking for something, I don't know what I'm looking for, but I'm looking. Writing is a lot about that. When you write a poem. When you write a novel.
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There is a way in which all writing is connected. In a second language, for example, a workshop can liberate the students' use of the vocabulary they're acquiring.
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Sometimes it can be really exciting, but I avoid the blank page now. What I do is hand write everything. When you're hand writing, there's never a blank page, really. There's so much you can do with that.
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I love writing essays and articles, so it's hard for me to resist taking assignments that inevitably pull me away from larger projects.
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I don't really wanna think about themes. I wanna just think about the experience of the movie. I feel like, as soon as I reduce it to a theme, once I write that sentence, it won't be that great. I feel like there's more potential for it to mean something interesting if I'm not forcing it to mean something I've already decided.
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Writing really evokes empathy in a way very few things can do.
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I think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not nuclear physics. It actually has to give pleasure or it is worth nothing.
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When everything works best, it's not because you chose writing but because writing chose you. It's when you're mad with it, it's when it's stuffed in your ears, your nostrils, under your fingernails. It's when there's no hope but that.
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It's very hard to deal with true subject matter, especially when you're writing about such weighty issues.
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I think I'm funnier in my writing than in person.
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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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I started writing in the '90s, so I was free to just have an eccentric career and not conform to some idea of what a black writer has to do. I didn't have the burden of representation.
Colson Whitehead -
I started writing stories when I was 9 or 10. I wrote my first screenplay-type document when I was 14.
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I've had to try and find a way over the years of writing narratively that doesn't really require you to sit down and work out what the story's about. You're brought into a sort of sequence of images that have that emotional resonance, but it's kind of irrelevant what the actual story is. It's taken me maybe 13 albums or something to work that out.
