Writing Quotes
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Everything I say about writing battles applies equally well in the boudoir.
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I discovered that I had, in the past two decades, written a far greater amount in the essay form than I remembered. Certainly I have written enough of it to demonstrate that I harbor no disdain for literary journalism or just plain journalism, under whose sponsorship I have been able to express much that has fascinated me, or alarmed me, or amused me, or otherwise engaged my attention when I was not writing a book.
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I don't have any sense of an audience when I'm writing. I don't consider the audience. Because all I'm interested in is the problem on the page.
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I'm not saying that I don't experience people in life as evil, but writing is not a place of alienation; writing is the place where we can try to be human.
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When writing poetry, it is not that produces a bright idea, but the bright idea that kindles the fire of.
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The way to write American music is simple. All you have to do is be an American and then write any kind of music you wish.
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I don't write books for people to be friends with the characters. If you want to find friends, go to a cocktail party.
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When you recognize good writing and you're lucky enough to get it, like with Lost, that's what I follow.
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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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When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write.
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One of the things I learnt over the years is that there is a craft to writing, like there is a craft to acting. I hadn't done my apprenticeship as a writer. I did try to be a writer for hire but I'm not any good at it.
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Throughout my early career, I would write from five to ten in the morning every day before going to my office, a habit that has stayed with me since.
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Before I got my present job, I spent many years teaching writing part-time, so-called, at community colleges and universities. It's academia's version of migrant labor.
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I knew that what I did visually could not be completely understood. I knew that certain aspects of the work need a long time to develop. You get the visual idea in two seconds, but this idea can be developed like like a theory. You can see later on if the theory was correct, followed, or completely abandoned. That's why the writing can advance what is done. This is more or less how I started to write: to be sure that people will not totally misunderstand what my goal was.
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We write about ourselves because we know about ourselves.
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If some of the people who write about mojo came with me for a week, they would drop dead on their feet.
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I've never conceptualized much of what I write about. Maybe, once I'm onto something, I'll conceptualize a finished record. I want the songs to tie together and make sense together. I'm not like, "Oh, I want to explore this idea." That's just not how the creative process works for me. It's more like something strikes me, or finds me, and then I wrestle with it after that. I don't sit back in my armchair, like, "What kind of philosophy can I explore today?"
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When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.
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My abilities grow with each job, whether it's writing or directing. When I stop learing, I'll stop working.
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Many novice writers, students in particular, think that writing is little more than copying down their self-talk, the palaver of the voices they hear in their heads. Of course, self-talk is thinking, and writing begins with thinking.
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When I write a book I'm always questioning the project as a whole. I always feel I might have to just throw it away and forget about it, and I've done that with novels I've started and worked on for a long time. It's an option I need in order to write freely.
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Writing is easy. Just sit in front of a typewriter, open up a vein and bleed it out drop by drop.
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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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It's a complex thing when you're writing a novel, because so much of it is conscious and planned and deliberate, and so much of it is not, and it has to be a dance between the conscious and the unconscious. I bring my best instincts to my work. For instance - and I come by this naturally, or I think I do - I am a very good judge of character.
