Writing Quotes
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I think that life is incredibly violent and that individual people are incredibly violent on one level or another. I don't try to change life to suit my writing; in a certain way I'm a naturalist of the nineteenth century school.
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If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden.
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The history of the development of contemporary writing in Vancouver from 1946 to 1960 is pretty largely a one-man show, and that man was me.
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The biggest problem is that people want to tell the whole story, and they write letters that are way longer than anything I could possibly run.
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When I'm writing a score, I'm constantly looking for ways to improve on it, even when I think it's working well. I don't give up on things, and am always trying to make incremental improvements, which means I never finish writing a score early!
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I was a businessman for 16 years of my life, so when I started writing, I wanted to keep my literary identity separate.
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Painting and writing are solitary arts.
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Writing is an escape from a world that crowds me. I like being alone in a room. It's almost a form of meditation- an investigation of my own life.
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I don't wait for inspiration. I get up and write every day.
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'The Searcher,' as the title suggests, is about someone in search of something, and I have always loved quest stories and so was drawn to writing one myself.
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There's always somebody you can call and go have lunch with and just talk out an idea. And it's great, because I need that. It's part of my writing process, to early on sit people down and say, 'Alright, this film I'm working on...' and I tell them everything I have.
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The lyrics seem to follow the music, and that's usually how I write. I write more about what comes out of my mouth while I'm writing the chords, and that seems to work better than filling up notebooks of what I think is really cool poetry, and try to put it on a song. That usually sounds like it's taped on.
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I'm one of those people that believes you should start writing before you think you're ready.
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When I need to work up my nerve to write a tough column, I try to think of myself as Emma Peel in a black leather catsuit.
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I'm writing songs about New York. A lot of them carry the names of neighborhoods in Long Island. Maspeth, Montauk. I'm getting into the idea of a F. Scott Fitzgerald-esque Long Island back when New York was...New York.
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It is better to be able neither to read nor write than to be able to do nothing else.
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I can't read or write music. When I want to remember something, I try to remember all the keys on the piano. Which is what I still do. I put the numbers on the keys. And that's got to become music again.
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Every writer I've ever spoken to feels fraudulent in some way or other.
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Sit down to write what you have thought, and not to think what you shall write.
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When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book as well as reading it - or rather, it is like living it. It makes reading so much more exciting, but I don't suppose many people try to do it.
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what a writer does is to try to make sense of life. I think that's what writing is, I think that's what painting is. It's seeking that thread of order and logic in the disorder, and the incredible waste and marvelous profligate character of life. What all artists are trying to do is to make sense of life.
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Be careful that what you write does not offend anybody or cause problems within the company. The safest approach is to remove all useful information.
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Don't ever write anything you don't like yourself and if you do like it, don't take anyone's advice about changing it. They just don't know.
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So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.
