Writing Quotes
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My goals as an artist have nothing to do with speaking to an audience. I love to have a good time, but when it comes to poetry I'm not really interested in writing poetry that seeks to entertain or operate safely within the mainstream and, to be clear, I'm not disparaging the really phenomenal work that does - it's just not my interest as a poet.
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One of the more interesting things I've learnt since becoming a writer is that if you like the book, you'll generally like the person. It doesn't always work in reverse - there are huge numbers of lovely people out there writing not very good books.
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I've been doing some writing, which I find very cathartic and fun.
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What if you began to expect the best from any situation? Isn't it possible that you could write new chapters in your life with happy endings? Suspend your disbelief? Take a leap of faith? After all, what have you got to lose but misery and lack?
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As I write, snow is falling outside my Maine window, and indoors all around me half a hundred garden catalogues are in bloom.
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I've always had an ear for melodies, and they veer pop. My lyrics are more country - what I love is the storytelling and the structure, how tight the rhymes can be. But pop melodies have always been intrinsically linked to my writing style.
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If you write a bunch of different characters with a bunch of different opinions, you end up with these long scenes of everyone standing around talking.
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I'm not calculating enough in the way I approach writing.
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Writing teaches writing. Your writing will teach you how to write if you work hard enough and have enough faith.
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Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf" and there was no wolf behind him.
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I wouldn't care to speculate about what it is in Westlake's psyche that makes him so good at writing about Parker, much less what it is that makes me like the Parker novels so much. Suffice it to say that Stark/Westlake is the cleanest of all noir novelists, a styleless stylist who gets to the point with stupendous economy, hustling you down the path of plot so briskly that you have to read his books a second time to appreciate the elegance and sober wit with which they are written.
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I wanted to be as invisible as possible as an artist. I wanted to differentiate between myself and who I'm writing about.
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I'm not against sentimentality. I think you need it. I mean, I don't think you get a true picture of people without it in writing... It's a kind of poetry, it's an emotional poetry, and, to bring it back to the literary scene, I don't think anything is true that doesn't have it, that doesn't have poetry in 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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All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you.
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Writing is a struggle no matter what the genre.
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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 think I'm way too much of a control freak to co-author anything with anyone. I have a hard enough time writing with myself! I admire people that can do it, but it's not for me.
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One of my biggest goals, especially with writing YA novels, is just to have people enjoy reading.
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One thing that I don't ever want to do is write something I don't love.
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I never sit down and write. I just sorta let things form in my brain.
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Writing is linear and sequential; Sentence B must follow Sentence A, and Sentence C must follow Sentence B, and eventually you get to Sentence Z. The hard part of writing isn't the writing; it's the thinking. You can solve most of your writing problems if you stop after every sentence and ask: What does the reader need to know next?
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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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You sit down in the morning on your own to write something. You get to the end of the day and it's not like you've cracked it and it's finished and it's done, because it can always be improved. It can always be changed. There is no right answer, so you can drive yourself crazy with just the expanse of infinite possibilities when it comes to writing.
