Writing Quotes
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Writing is rewriting; rewriting is writing - from the first crossed-out word in the first sentence to the last word inserted above a caret, that most helpful handwritten stroke.
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I honestly turned to writing because I didn't know what else to do, and because a friend had gently suggested it.
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I think that whether you've just begun writing or whether you've been writing for fifty years - I mean, I'm excited to get there and tell you about it when I do - I think that there's always the challenge of believing in yourself enough to get the work done and not being so taken with yourself that you're unwilling to continue to work on the work.
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Any fool can write a book and most of them are doing it; but it takes brains to build a house.
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I'm no romantic, surfing, California boy. I like reading, writing, philosophizing. Scheming. I've been doing some exploration of the inner space.
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I approach writing stories as a recorder. I think of my role as some kind of reporting device - recording and projecting.
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There are two kinds of typical days. There's the typical day when I'm writing a novel, and there's the typical day when I'm not.
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By definition it uses and plays and delights in time. It delights in the interlacing of chronologies and the consequences of that interlacing. And those have personal and psychological expressions in a character. Aside from other issues of writing, psychological characterization is what narrative can do best.
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I didn't start writing songs, honestly, until I started making my album. I was always doing poetry, but I never thought I could write songs. I discouraged myself and thought it was so hard. But starting this process and learning just what it is to be a songwriter and performer taught me that you don't have to feel discouraged about anything.
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Nothing mattered ... but writing books, and living the kind of life that made it possible to write them.
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I continue to write. It's just one of those things that I do. I'll have periods when I write and periods when I don't. But you don't want it to become a discipline really. If it becomes a discipline, it becomes a chore and that's no good.
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I have so many songs, it's ridiculous. I love so many different types of music and tend to write all over the map, style-wise. R&B, rock 'n' roll, screamers, pop, good-time songs.
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Whenever a songwriter writes a big hit, then the next 20 songs they write - no matter how bad they are - get recorded.
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Writing for adults often means just increasing the swearing - but find an alternative to swearing and you've probably got a better line.
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Writing detective stories is about writing light literature, for entertainment. It isn't primarily a question of writing propaganda or classical literature.
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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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When you're writing for a show, you're writing part of the script. You have to tell the story.
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If writing is language and language is desire and longing and suffering . . . then why when we write, when we make shapes on paper, why then does it so often look like the traditional, straight models, why does our longing look for example like John Updike's longing?
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Kids are naturally inventive and curious and creative, but most adults have had that beaten out of them. Writing is a form of play; you have to get rid of all those internal censors that we adults have, the things that say, 'Don't go there, that's not allowed.
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Often I find that poems predict what I'm going to do later in my own writing, and often I find that poems predict my life. So I think poetry is the most intense expression of feeling that we have.
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People say I write specifically about nothing in particular. I don't know about the latter part, but I think the first part is really important in conjuring up a voice that works, or at least the illusion of a voice at work.
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If a reporter doesn't like the person he's writing about, it shows up in his article.
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I used to give her my wife to read the column every week before I sent it to the editors. And sometimes she was so mad - are you crazy? You're not going to send that, or, you're not going to write that about me. So I would go, OK. You have five hours. Go ahead, write the column yourself.
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The most I can do is to go as far as I can, writing my own story in the dust with my two feet, word for word.
