Writing Quotes
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Everyone assumes writers spend their time lounging around, writing and occasionally striking a pose whilst having a think.
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The writing process is very much like being in a dark tunnel, and you don't really know what you will end up with until you have created it.
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I've had to try and find a way over the years of writing narratively that doesn't really require you to sit down and work out what the story's about. You're brought into a sort of sequence of images that have that emotional resonance, but it's kind of irrelevant what the actual story is. It's taken me maybe 13 albums or something to work that out.
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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 feel very strong about 'Brother.' This is me. I've been writing with a much more free sky, open and free.
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People ask me, 'Why angels? Why paranormal? Why teens?' In the beginning, I'm not sure I knew I was starting down any of those twisted paths - paths that now seem so familiar to me that they are downright comforting. In the beginning, I was just writing about love.
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We are all inspired by the incredible stories of handicapped people who write novels with their toes, cancer victims who run marathons for cancer research, bereaved parents who set up memorial funds for their lost children. How much easier is it for most of us to be small heroes simply by taking responsibility for our daily lives and transcending our ordinary obstacles?
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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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By the end of the writing process, which is about 80 songs per album, I look at the material and think, what's going to make a difference in someone's life.
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Writing a nonfiction story is like cracking a safe. It seems impossible at the beginning, but once you're in, you're in.
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So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.
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I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior FBI-men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep-hole and missing laundry list school. ... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.
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The habit of writing for my eye is good practice. It loosens the ligaments.
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Sonnets are guys writing in English, imitating an Italian song form. It was a form definitely sung as often as it was recited.
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You have to simply love writing, and you have to remind yourself often that you love it.
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It wasn't a leap for me to go from not wanting to be in my body as a teenager, not wanting to be in my house, to thinking, 'What would happen if I had disappeared?' And then going from writing scenes of angry kids to thinking a little more about the parents and what their lives would be like.
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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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Every time I think I know what's right and wrong, I end up being wrong. All I want to do is explore. I want to see what people would do. I say, 'What would this person do in this situation?' and I write it down. I'm not writing manifestos of my political views.
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He's writing what I'm singing, and I'm writing what he's playing.
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Writing's a great skill, but thinking's a better one.
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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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I went to college in North Carolina, and that's how I learned how to play music. I learned how to play guitar when I was 12, and I was always in bands, but the first time I ever started writing my own music was being surrounded by a lot of songwriter friends in North Carolina.
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I always talk to my students about the need to write for the joy of writing. I try to sort of disaggregate the acclaim from the act of writing.
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I love experimental writing, when it's good, and good examples are much more likely to be found in the short form.
