Writing Quotes
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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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A writers desire to write can only have come from previous experience of literature, and he'll start by imitating whatever he's read, which usually means what the people around him are writing.
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Compelling a man by law to pay his money to elect candidates or advocate law or doctrines he is against differs only in degree, if at all, from compelling him by law to speak for a candidate, a party, or a cause he is against. The very reason for the First Amendment is to make the people of this country free to think, speak, write and worship as they wish, not as the Government commands.
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I realized all the writing I love lives in the gray area.
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It is dishonorable to say one thing and think another; how much more dishonorable to write one thing and think another.
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Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it.
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The calligraphic letter is not entirely a letter, but something that sits between writing and music
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Fiction writers are strange beasts. They are, like all writers, observers first and foremost. Everything that happens to and around them is potential material for a story, and they look at it that way.
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LCD is a band about a band writing music about writing music.
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My kids don't really like when I sing for some reason...but they like when I play guitar. So I started writing songs just playing guitar for them.
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My prescription for writer's block is to face the fact that there is no such thing.... Writing well is difficult, but one can always write something. And then, with a lot of work, make it better. It's a question of having enough will and ambition, not of hoping to evade this mysterious hysteria people are always talking about.
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I don't write political plays in the sense that I'm writing essays that are kind of disguised as plays. I would really defy anyone to watch any of my plays and say 'Well, here's the point.'
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I studied Comparative Literature at Cornell. Structuralism was real big then. The idea of reading and writing as being this language game. There's a lot of appeal to that. It's nice to think of it as this playful kind of thing. But I think that another way to look at it is "Look, I just want to be sincere. I want to write something and make you feel something and maybe you will go out and do something." And it seems that the world is in such bad shape now that we don't have time to do nothing but language games. That's how it seems to me.
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Depending upon shock tactics is easy, whereas writing a good play is difficult. Pubic hair is no substitute for wit.
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I often think of random melodies. And I pretty much hear in my head what I want to do with the orchestra as I'm writing on the piano.
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My family is involved and my wife Brenda is a great, great writer. She helps me with the writing of everything and also sings with me. I owe a lot to Brenda.
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I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.
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And to use something as elegant as a tree? Imagine this design assignment: Design something that makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distills water, makes complex sugars and foods, changes colors with the seasons, and self-replicates. and then why don't we knock that down and write on it?
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... And the only way to find that honesty is to not overthink it. For your writing to come alive--to be multi-dimensional--you must barter away some control.
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I think when people hear about a celebrity writing a book of any kind, the assumption is that it was dictated to a ghostwriter.
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If you had told me twenty years ago that I would write a novel set in Russia, much less two, I simply wouldn't have believed you. I had no familiarity with Russia or its history, but part of what drives me as a reader, and more and more as a writer, is curiosity, the desire to explore unfamiliar terrain and inhabit alternate lives.
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I was interested in all kinds of things, whether it be Avatar, Mad Men, Troy, 300, Battlestar Gallactica, or the poems of Horace and Sappho. I always joke about this to my students, who can't quite wrap their mind around the fact that you can have a Ph.D in classics, but not do that full time. I never wanted to write anything with footnotes for the rest of my life. I always think of what I do as the kind of conversation you'd have with somebody, like a good friend, when you've gone and seen a movie together, and you come home and you start talking about it.
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Whatever I was writing at the time, I knew there was no market for it and never would be, because there’s never a market for true art, so my main concern was always to have a job that didn’t require me to write or think.
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I look at writing as a medium of entertainment. You can get too precious about your stuff. It has to compete with everything else, like DVDs and CDs.
