Writing Quotes
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I had decided to be a magician well before I decided to be a writer. I was the little boy who would get up on-stage and do magic wearing a fake mustache, which would fall off during the performance. I'm still trying to perform those tricks. Now I do it with writing.
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A great performance like Lady Macbeth may be forgotten. Writing endures.
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I fell into lyric writing because of music. I backed into it.
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I hope I never have to stop acting. I love it. But, I think the coolest thing about acting is working with these amazing people all the time, and writing represented a new way to meet those people and to tell stories, at the same time, which I've always wanted to do, and to tell jokes. I love comedy, so writing was a way of getting these jokes that I had down on the page.
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I write poetry. It comes naturally to me, but from a technical point of view it forces me to pay close attention to language and to scan.
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A writer is like a bag lady going through life with a sack and a pointed stick collecting stuff.
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I spend 60 hours a week on my business but I don't work for a minute. Work is hard. But what I do - writing, speaking, researching, learning, and sharing information - is pure joy. It's what I was called to do.
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I started writing when I was 13. I got my first electric guitar when I was 13, but I'd always been singing. I had my first little acoustic when I was six. But I started being in bands when I was 13.
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When you get to say something in a song you're not directing it necessarily at one person. When it's in a song it's easier to get it out. I don't really worry so much about it when I'm writing a song.
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Write drunk; edit sober.
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Writing is my form of celebration and prayer.
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I write, and when see a movie in which it's supernatural, some other worlds, or some other aspect to our world that we're not aware of, and [they] don't explain what the rules are, that kind of stuff drives me crazy.
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My general approach to making art making hasn't changed much since I was 20, poor, and writing songs in my bedroom wanting to get my art out of my body into the world in some way.
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I don't particularly love live performance of my music. I love writing and recording, but you can't make money off of that.
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I always say to my students, 'If you can do anything other than writing and be happy, then you should.'
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Writing, for me, has always been a way of not having a career.
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You can be far more challenging, articulate and intelligent writing for television than you can writing for the cinema.
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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 -
Good God! This man should be writing dime novels.
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Write the story, take out all the good lines, and see if it still works.
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Writing really evokes empathy in a way very few things can do.
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Writing a book about yourself is like therapy, and you go 'Oh My God, that's the reason that happened.' Writing about it, you're forced to really examine things.
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Writing is like everything else: the more you do it the better you get. Don't try to perfect as you go along, just get to the end of the damn thing. Accept imperfections. Get it finished and then you can go back. If you try to polish every sentence there's a chance you'll never get past the first chapter.
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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.
