Writing Quotes
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To those people doubting Serena Williams, writing her off - do not do that to a champion.
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Style comes only have long, hard practice and writing.
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Learn. Ceaselessly. Learn to code, to write persuasively, to understand new technologies, to bring out the best in your team, to find underused resources and to spot patterns.
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I can’t remember how many times I advised students to stop writing the sunny hours and write from where it hurts: No one wants to read polite. It puts them to sleep.
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Now I'm fortunate to have a good band in CA, and play many solo gigs as well. My point is that I stopped playing in bands and played solo for four years, to get back into the groove and pulse of writing and singing and who I am on stage.
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Good writing is good conversation, only more so.
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I have to write the story I want to write. I never wrote them with a focus group of 8-year-olds in mind. I have to continue telling the story the way I want to tell it.
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If you were a fully realized person-whatever the hell that would be-you wouldn't fool around writing books.
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Writing can be described in two verbs: Throw up and clean up.
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The only good writing is intuitive writing. It would be a big bore if you knew where it was going. It has to be exciting, instantaneous and it has to be a surprise. Then it all comes blurting out and it’s beautiful. I’ve had a sign by my typewriter for 25 years now which reads, ‘DON’T THINK!’
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How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.
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My female writers have always been my backbone. I had a writing room of six women for five years so I know what women do. Cultivated by me, by the way!
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When I finally got tired of arguing with her and decided to write a novel as if I was some kind of formulaic, genre writing drone, just to prove to her how awful it would be, I wrote the first book of the Dresden Files.
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There are times when I want to be plainspoken about my feelings in a song. But there are other times when it's really good to try and get my head around different kinds of song structures, or maybe I might get turned on by trying to write a song that would fit in this one scene in a movie. And by the end of all this, you just end up with a bunch of different ideas. And songs are really just ideas.
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I'm simply the happiest, the placidest, when I'm writing, and so I suppose that that, for me, is the final answer. ... It's fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats as I am most of the time.
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All I'm doing is writing it down and putting it in a cadence. Once I get into a cadence, then why should I even stop and wonder what it is? You can do that for the rest of your life, but when it's coming out, you don't want to stop it.
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The nature of making music and making art, what motivates me is that it's interesting. It's interesting to listen, to really listen to other people's point-of-view. Take in their work. Listen to the way they sing. Listen to the way they write lyrics. What they are trying to express.
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The best writing advice I ever got was "Keep moving forward, don't retreat into rewrites." The worst came from a book that said "Writing fiction is like telling lies," which just seems stupid to me.
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I didn't want the lyrics to be about specific things in my life, I wanted them to be about generalised experiences I'd had. So when I'm writing about relationships or somebody leaving you or something, a lot of lyrics are partly about failed relationships I'd had, but they were also about my Dad, and being abandoned as a kid.
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I'll be writing essays long after I've stopped writing fiction. There is this unusually broad range in the non-fiction, but if you look at what I'm capable of as a novelist, I'm more limited.
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I just can't ever be a free spirit and just relax. When it comes to work, this is good. I'm very disciplined, which with writing is often half the battle, or more. But it also means that if I want to, say, play hooky and chocolate and watch Bravo all afternoon, I feel horribly guilty. I wish I could find a nice balance.
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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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On tour, it's hard to do much writing, but if I'm on a deadline, I find a way.
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Writing original songs is much, much harder (I think) because you only have yourself to conjure up EVERY single moment a listener is going to hear. It's a craft that goes directly from your brain to their ears. You can never be sure that what you're writing is gonna be good enough to keep a listener engaged and truly experience something. It's a shot in the dark.
