Writing Quotes
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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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The problem with literature, with writing, is that it works sometimes in terms of correction of social ills. Other times, it just does not suffice. The proof of that is the ability of a dictator to snuff out the life of a writer.
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Everything I know, I write about. My only research is what I did.
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There is a way in which all writing is connected. In a second language, for example, a workshop can liberate the students' use of the vocabulary they're acquiring.
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I came to Hollywood originally writing comedy and writing satire.
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The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.
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When you write, you're supposed to go stand somewhere else for a while, see things from a perspective that's not in line with your own reflexive truths.
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Lord, how tired one gets of one's own writing.
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I myself hate that old Hemingwayesque paradigm of the writer as prizefighter and I have tried hard to create an alternate one for myself. When Anne Sexton admonished me, "We are all writing God's poem," I took it to mean there should be no competition between writers because we are all involved in a common project, a common prayer. But to Gore's and Norman's generation, particularly those male writers who served in the second world war, the prizefighter paradigm remains.
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I honestly don't have many creative outlets. I'm not crafty - although motherhood has forced me to try to be - and I can only draw trees, beaches, and clouds. I'm a so-so cook except for deviled eggs. Writing has always been the one thing I feel that I am pretty good at doing. But it's enough, thank goodness.
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I'd like to find a creative way to write a book that incorporates every Depeche Mode song ever.
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Writing is not a special language that belongs to a few sensitive souls who have a 'gift for words'. Writing is the logical arrangement of thought. Anyone who thinks clearly should be able to write clearly---about any subject at all.
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I like to begin every screenplay with a burst of delusional self-confidence. It tends to fade pretty quickly, but for me, at least, there doesn't seem to be any other way to start writing a script.
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I'm not one of those people who writes a biography or tries to figure out what kind of ice cream the character liked when he was 10.
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My writing arises out of erotic impulse toward an other: it is an act of love. And I want terribly to be loved in return, as a sign that I have loved well enough.
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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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We write to find out what we didn’t know we knew. We write to know deeper and truer. We write to connect the dots: a whole new constellation.
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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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Blocks usually stem from fear of being judged. If you imagine the world is listening, you'll never write a line.
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It is better to be able neither to read nor write than to be able to do nothing else.
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coincident with the explosive growth of research, the art of writing science suffered a grave setback, and the stultifying convention descended that the best scientific prose should sound like a non-human author addressing a mechanical reader. ... We injure ourselves when we fail to make our discipline as clear and vibrant as we can to students - prospective scientists - and to the public who pay the taxes.
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My biggest extravagances are also investments. I have several houses in California, a house in Nashville, an office complex, and I bought the old home place in Tennessee. They are different places for me to write, but I can turn right around and sell them.
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All our songs are about real people, true events. We do write about DC Comics and things like The Replacements. It's pretty much good conversations that happen at Art Brut shows. It's like making friends - like a Wanted ad: "Man that likes the Replacements and DC Comics wants friends to drink with at venue tonight. Who's coming?" It's like that.
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Saul Bellow once said, 'A writer is a reader who has moved to emulation' — which I think is true. I just started writing and made that jump from reader to writer and learned how hard it was, but also how much fun it was — losing myself in these imaginary worlds.
