Writing Quotes
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I don't enjoy writing newspaper articles any more than people like reading them. I'm a standup comic, not a journalist, although sometimes onstage I will say: 'What else is in the news?' Writing is work, which I'm not comfortable with.
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I didn't want the lyrics to be about specific things in my life, I wanted them to be about generalised experiences I'd had. So when I'm writing about relationships or somebody leaving you or something, a lot of lyrics are partly about failed relationships I'd had, but they were also about my Dad, and being abandoned as a kid.
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I think that very often younger writers don't appreciate how much hard work is involved in writing. The part of writing that's magic is the thinnest rind on the world of creation. Most of a writer's life is just work. It happens to be a kind of work that the writer finds fulfilling in the same way that a watchmaker can happily spend countless hours fiddling over the tiny cogs and bits of wire. ... I think the people who end up being writers are people who don't get bored doing that kind of tight focus in small areas.
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I think poetry is the best thing I do. It's certainly the purest. I seem to switch gears without too much trouble. Non-fiction is in many ways the easiest to write.
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You want to be a writer? A writer is someone who writes every day, so start writing. You don't have a job? Get one. Any job. Don't sit at home waiting for the magical opportunity. Who are you? Prince William? No. Get a job. Go to work. Do something until you can do something else.
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When you're writing a sketch, it has to be surrounded by a situation. It can't just be out of the air.
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The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again. There is no way to be sure of any this.
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I had taken some of my solo music into the record label. They didn't really care for the direction I was moving in and I found it really disheartening. They wanted a pop hit, which I understand in terms of making money. I get that. But what they were going to ask of me was something I wasn't prepared to deliver and I felt kind of trapped. I just stopped writing. I just stopped. It was stifling.
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I often give this metaphor where I say that writing short fiction is like surfing, while writing a novel is like navigating with your car. So when you navigate with your car, you want to get somewhere. When you surf, you don't want to get somewhere, you just don't want to fall off your board.
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When you're writing you're constantly fighting demons to sit down and do what you do. If you listen to the voices outside your head, in addition to the ones inside your head, you'll never get anything done. There's enough inner strife.
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The work of Jana Harris is unique in American writing. She has always had a voice of true grit—sometimes harsh, sometimes funny, always close to the bone, tart, and indomitable.
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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 don't really have a set-in-stone process or formula. Sometimes the melody is there and I have to chase down the lyrics. Sometimes, the song is there and I have to make the melody fit. What I've learned so far about songwriting is that I can't force a song. If I try to do that, it's hollow, and people know a hollow song when they hear it. It's the song they stop listening to and forget about. I'd prefer not to write those kinds of songs.
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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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Writing a book about yourself is like therapy, and you go 'Oh My God, that's the reason that happened.' Writing about it, you're forced to really examine things.
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Paintings must be understood through the eyes, and that's not the word either. No writing, no talking, no singing, no dancing will explain them. They are the final, the nth whoopee of sight.
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Good God! This man should be writing dime novels.
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I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.
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It's difficult to write a book where a character is on virtually every page of the book but you cannot refer to his or her gender. It gets rid of every his, her, she and he.
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To justify an unorthodox life by writing about it is to re-inscribe the original violation, to re-violate masculine turf.
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A good book is a good book, and there are a lot of different ways to approach writing or reading one.
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If I'm not at my study by 10:00, 10:30, forget it, I can't write a word.
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It's often women who are writing leading roles for women. Most of the stuff that comes my way is not actually about women. I'm just asked to be a supporting player in a story about a man, and I, frankly, was not interested in doing that.
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I love writing essays and articles, so it's hard for me to resist taking assignments that inevitably pull me away from larger projects.
