Writing Quotes
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Nature never writes a blind hand.
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The hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn, and anybody is cheating who takes politics as a way out. All the outs are too easy, and the thing itself is too hard to do.
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Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn't write, I would stop breathing.
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With "Margaret," I remember clearly it was, you know because I did remember it clearly. I was young. I was young in terms of experience and what did I know about and I had an incredible memory from my own childhood. And so it never occurred to me to write for any other age group. And I thought I'm going to write a book and I'm going to tell the truth.
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If I'm still wistful about On the Road, I look on the rest of the Kerouac oeuvre--the poems, the poems!--in horror. Read Satori in Paris lately? But if I had never read Jack Kerouac's horrendous poems, I never would have had the guts to write horrendous poems myself. I never would have signed up for Mrs. Safford's poetry class the spring of junior year, which led me to poetry readings, which introduced me to bad red wine, and after that it's all just one big blurry condemned path to journalism and San Francisco.
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I'm pretty fortunate that I'm in the films I'm in largely because the directors have asked me to be in them. I'd love to do more of them, but the writing and historical stuff I'll probably always do.
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When we read our own writing, we all think it clearly expresses what we mean, because when we read it, we are only reminding ourselves of what we had in mind when we wrote it.
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To me there is no such thing as creative writing. It's either good writing, whatever the subject, or it's not creative.
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Since childhood, I wrote a lot of fiction, a lot of stories, but I most loved writing essays.
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I don't intend to write the same kind of book for the rest of my life because I feel I would not be satisfied only writing in one mode.
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Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it.
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I'm writing songs to perform, to entertain. And when I'm really trying to get inspired, I go backwards, and I just rap.
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When I was a graduate student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop for fiction writing, I felt both coveted and hated. My white classmates never failed to remind me that I was more fortunate than they were at this particular juncture in American literature.
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The best books come from someplace inside. You don't write because you want to, but because you have to.
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I like garage band for writing because you only have crayons and there are only five crayons in the box. Your choices are limited and I find that to be very good for me.
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I don't think I'm interested in writing women's novels anymore.
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I go in for what is known in the trade as 'light writing' and those who do that - humorists they are sometimes called - are looked down upon by the intelligentsia and sneered at.
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When you make a melody that doesn't come with words from the get-go, sometimes you're just thinking about random vowel sounds that go with it - and it's really, really hard to write lyrics that actually obey the vowel sounds.
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If you're going to do a thing, do it fully so that no writing you give the world misrepresents you - so that nothing you put out there is like a sad regift you couldn't throw away and had to find a place for.
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Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.
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You look at shows on cable, and there's a lot of smart writing out there.
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The Public Theater requires one to be very public, and writing requires one to be very private.
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Although I like the work I've done in the past, I like what I'm writing now even more.
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After the first shock of recognition - a sudden sense of "this is what I'm going to write" - the novel starts to breed by itself; the process goes on solely in the mind, not on paper. I feel a kind of gentle development, an uncurling inside, and I know that the details are there already, that in fact I would see them plainly if I looked closer, but I prefer to wait until what is loosely called inspiration has completed the task for me.
