Writing Quotes
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I think growing up in a small town, the kind of people I met in my small town, they still haunt me. I find myself writing about them over and over again.
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On a very personal level, I have fond memories of spending a lot of time in the Library of Congress working on my collection of poems 'Native Guard.' I was there over a summer doing research in the archives and then writing in the reading room at the Jefferson building.
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I think of myself as a very ordinary person. I like writing about the juxtaposition between people: the beauty of them at times and then the banal, everyday context in which we find ourselves.
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I found it really hard for a couple of years to do any writing because all I wanted to do was play the fiddle. From the minute I took it up, I just couldn't put it down.
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Usually I decide on what it is I'm writing next by the books I'm reading.
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An English journalist called Michael Viney told me when I was 25, that I would write well if I cared a lot what I was writing about. That worked. I went home that day and wrote about parents not understanding their children as well as we teachers did, and it was published the very next week.
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All writing is that structure of revelation. There's something you want to find out. If you know everything up front in the beginning, you really don't need to read further if there's nothing else to find out.
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Like the child, the creative writing student is posited as a centre of vulnerable creativity, needful of attention and authority.
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I tend to read more nonfiction, really, because when I'm writing I don't like to read other fiction.
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When I'm not working in a professional capacity, I'm writing, and when I'm at home, it's a way of having contact with people or communicating.
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I did a lot of my writing as though I was an academic, doing some piece of research as perfectly as possible.
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I think I'm genuinely sincere, and that's what hopefully makes it work. I take that very seriously when I'm writing.
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I'm never interested in writing a kind of neutral, universal novel that could be set anywhere. To me, the novel is a local thing.
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There is no formula to it. Writing every song is a little journey. The first note has to lift you.
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I'm one of those people who go through the world giving other people thrills, but getting few myself except those I read into men on such nights as these. I have the social courage to go on the stage, but not the energy; I haven't the patience to write books; and I never met a man I'd marry. However, I'm only eighteen.
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My song-writing has always been just about my life - usually my worst moments.
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Music can be such a vulnerable thing, so when you're delivering a vocal or writing a piece of music, it's easy to get sideways.
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I remember listening to the radio as a kid and finding that the songs always made me feel more peaceful. Funny, but the more hurtin' the music was, the better it made me feel. I think of that now when I write my songs. I may not be feelin' the blues myself, but I'm writing them for other people who have a hard life.
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I gave up writing for seven years (very biblical) and picked it up again, still clueless and still seeking the exotic, when I was twenty-one.
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We cannot overlook the importance of wild country as source of inspiration, to which we give expression in writing, in poetry, drawing and painting, in mountaineering, or in just being there.
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My own writing has perhaps more of an American flavor than a British one, but that's because the stories I've so far written have needed it. 'Empire State,' 'Seven Wonders' and 'The Age Atomic' are all very place-centric, where the setting itself is almost a character. But there is a universality to story that isn't just limited to science fiction.
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The problem with writing a monthly book is that you're going through your work like a man running for a bus, red-faced and out of breath. There isn't time for reflection or critical self-examination.
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I care about writing music and playing my music.
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When I was writing for children, I was writing genre fiction. It was like making a good chair. It needed four legs of the same length, it had to be the right height and it had to be comfortable.
