Writing Quotes
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Teaching and writing are separate, but serve/feed one another in so many ways. Writing travels the road inward, teaching, the road out - helping OTHERS move inward - it is an honor to be with others in the spirit of writing and encouragement.
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I'm very unhappy when I'm not writing.
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I've been writing since I was 11. But I don't write with a pen, I just sing at the piano with one eye shut like a pirate.
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From an early age, my favorite thing to read was novels. For years, when I was writing only nonfiction, still I was reading almost exclusively novels. It's weird to be producing something that you don't consume. It feels really alienating.
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When you're writing a song, you have to know two things. You have to know who you are, and you have to think about other people.
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The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention.
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My kids don't really like when I sing for some reason...but they like when I play guitar. So I started writing songs just playing guitar for them.
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I have terrible handwriting. I now say it's a learning disability... but a nun who was a very troubled woman hit me over the fingers with a ruler because my writing was so bad.
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I studied Comparative Literature at Cornell. Structuralism was real big then. The idea of reading and writing as being this language game. There's a lot of appeal to that. It's nice to think of it as this playful kind of thing. But I think that another way to look at it is "Look, I just want to be sincere. I want to write something and make you feel something and maybe you will go out and do something." And it seems that the world is in such bad shape now that we don't have time to do nothing but language games. That's how it seems to me.
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Writing is the thing that sustains me and keeps me going. It is a form of self-preservation for me.
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I think you can't write with anger. I think it always has to be with a wink. There always has to be an element of hope in what you write. Otherwise you're just getting mad and it's not going to be fun for anybody.
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I'm writing all the books I wish I had when I was a kid.
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My parents had an arranged marriage, as did so many other people when I was growing up. My father came and had a life in the United States one way and my mother had a different one, and I was very aware of those things. I continue to wonder about it, and I will continue to write about it.
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To write a genuine familiar or truly English style is to write as anyone would speak in common conversation, who had a thorough command and choice of words, or who could discourse with ease, force, and perspicuity, setting aside all pedantic and oratorical flourishes.
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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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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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I use three main tools in writing: instinct, hard work and dumb luck. Dumb luck is missing a train and, while you wait for the next one, writing a key word, line or verse. When this happens often enough you begin to believe in Fate.
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My relationship with my mother has always felt like the most complicated relationship of my life. I know I have a lot more writing to do on this.
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I pretty much only write by default, because I want to make certain projects so instead of trying to wait and find them, I create them, but I'm not really a writer.
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When I was writing Caramelo the last couple of years, a sixty-hour work week was normal. And now I'm lucky if I have eight hours.
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Henry Miller was such a scribomaniac that even when he lived in the same house as Lawrence Durrell they often exchanged letters. For most of his life, Henry wrote literally dozens of letters a day to people he could have easily engaged in conversation - and did. The writing process, in short, was essential. As it is to all real writers, writing was life and breath to him. He put out words as a tree puts out leaves.
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The habit of writing for my eye is good practice. It loosens the ligaments.
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The acting background helped a lot when I started writing. I was training for it. In acting class they teach you about the stakes in a scene (and) what motivates characters. When you bring a scene to class - as an actor with your scene partner - you have to do everything. There's no producer, set decorator or anything like that. You and you partner have to do everything and that's kind of like facing the blank page as a writer.
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In the New Testament it is taught that willing and voluntary service to others is the highest duty and glory in human life. . . . The men of talent are constantly forced to serve the rest. They make the discoveries and inventions, order the battles, write the books, and produce the works of art. The benefit and enjoyment go to the whole. There are those who joyfully order their own lives so that they may serve the welfare of mankind.
