Writing Quotes
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For me, the optimum circumstances for writing a book are those of stultifying routine.
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Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.
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I prefer live musicians whenever possible. And I tailor the ensemble to what is appropriate for the film and the score I'm writing.
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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'm a rewriter. That's the part I like best . . . once I have a pile of paper to work with, it's like having the pieces of a puzzle. I just have to put the pieces together to make a picture.
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You can't write. That's not writing. It's scribbling. Distasteful scribbling. Why can't you write properly?
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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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Bernard Williams has been a distinctive presence on the intellectual scene for more than three decades. . . . His writings do not offer the dubious exhilaration of grand philosophical theory, in which messy reality is tamed and caged, but the thrill of seeing pretension punctured by a kind of high-voltage common sense (backed up by impressive erudition). . . . There is no one in philosophy quite like him.
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Sometimes you're writing a song and you have an image whilst writing a song. I don't think you ever base a songwriting process around a video, but when you're writing a song sometimes it'll be a very visual song.
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For a person whose sole burning ambition is to write - like myself - college is useless beyond the Sophomore year.
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You are always naked when you start writing; you are always as if you had never written anything before; you are always a beginner. Shakespeare wrote without knowing he would become Shakespeare
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I knew that I was writing for an American audience and that if I sold foreign rights, they would retranslate the book to make it make sense to that language. But one thing that was really important to me was not to italicize any of the words in the languages that were in the stories, because I feel like those foreign words felt just as important and integral to the story as everything else, so I wanted it all to just exist as its own thing.
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And I tend to listen to NPR when I'm not writing.
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I wouldn't care to speculate about what it is in Westlake's psyche that makes him so good at writing about Parker, much less what it is that makes me like the Parker novels so much. Suffice it to say that Stark/Westlake is the cleanest of all noir novelists, a styleless stylist who gets to the point with stupendous economy, hustling you down the path of plot so briskly that you have to read his books a second time to appreciate the elegance and sober wit with which they are written.
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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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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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It's easy to get discouraged; just keep writing because you love to do it, and you'll keep improving.
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I work even when I am on vacation. You know that line by Stéphane Mallarmé, "All earthly existence must ultimately be contained in a book"? I am the kind of person who finds life interesting only if it is translated into writing, if it is parsed into words.
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One demonstrable effect this type of work can have is in its viral promulgation. Take Kathy Acker for example: her work exists mainly through academic channels. Students are exposed to her novels, and some read her, then, on their own, but some also go to grad school: teach her, write about her, keep her going.
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In order to avoid sentimentality and to be able to write the screenplay with the kind of humor and irony necessary to keep the story moving, I needed to distance myself as much as I could from the characters, to try to get to a point where I could view them objectively.
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It's so easy to get caught up in your own self-doubt when you're writing. It can be so easy to tell yourself, "Who am I kidding?"
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The calligraphic letter is not entirely a letter, but something that sits between writing and music
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I wrote a couple of scripts on spec that didn't get made but got some attention, and I then got offers to write professionally.
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I'm a dreamer. I watch people. You don't try to become them because you could never become any of those guys. But you hope that some of it, you know, comes off on you at some point in your show, some point in your writing, that it happens to you and this light just shines on you.
