Writing Quotes
-
And truly, when you look at the Constitution and our founding fathers and their writings, the things that made this country great, you might draw those conclusions: That they were conservative. They were fiscally conservative and socially conservative.
-
As I write, snow is falling outside my Maine window, and indoors all around me half a hundred garden catalogues are in bloom.
-
The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.
-
I'm pretty fortunate that I'm in the films I'm in largely because the directors have asked me to be in them. I'd love to do more of them, but the writing and historical stuff I'll probably always do.
-
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.
-
You don't realise how much you're holding onto until you start to let go of it. I had had loads of therapy and thought I had come to terms with who I am, but there's something in the process of writing that unlocks other experiences, other emotions and you have to be prepared for that.
-
At first I had no skills in writing comedy. I didn't know what a joke was, but, as someone once told me, your emotions follow your intent. If you create the intention of starting a comedy act, slowly your mind starts adjusting and you arrive at a new emotional state.
-
The aim of my writing is to utterly remove the distance between author and reader so that the book becomes a sort of semipermeable membrane through which feelings, ideas, nutrients pass.
-
Don't fake enthusiasms. Say what you think, not what you think you ought to think.
-
If you are afraid to write or edit or assemble or disassemble, you are merely a spectator. And you are trapped, trapped by the instructions of those you've chosen to follow. Twenty people in the field and eighty thousand in the stands. The spectators are the ones who paid to watch, but it's the player on the field who are truly alive.
-
What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are while there's another force from inside battling to make us something else.
-
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.
-
My family is involved and my wife Brenda is a great, great writer. She helps me with the writing of everything and also sings with me. I owe a lot to Brenda.
-
My life is ruled by four W's: my writing, my work, my wife, and my whisky. Not necessarily in that order.
-
I love writing about unknown people.
-
Why cast yourself over a cliff, deciding in your writings about things of which you are ignorant? Why do you not keep to what you have received from the Fathers and Doctors of the Church? You introduce novelties!
-
Jerome Charyn is one of the most important writers in American literature and one of only three now writing whose work makes me truly happy to be a reader.
-
“Sometimes I wonder if the purpose of my writing is to find out whether other people have done or felt the same things or, if not, for them to consider experiencing such things as normal. Maybe I would also like them to live out these very emotions in turn, forgetting that they had once read about them somewhere.”
-
Writing is a conversation, to me. The best kind. You can't get interrupted.
-
I'm a dreamer. I watch people. You don't try to become them because you could never become any of those guys. But you hope that some of it, you know, comes off on you at some point in your show, some point in your writing, that it happens to you and this light just shines on you.
-
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.
-
The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are very often not really what happened. And as I started to write stuff down, I started to challenge what I thought I knew about myself, my culture, my family, all of it. It was a huge, destroying process that completely took over my life. I just wasn't here, I mean I was physically present, but I wasn't here, I was back in the 1980s.
-
I took out my journal. I'd been avoiding writing in it. I think I was afraid all my anger would spill out on the pages. And I just didn't want to look at all that rage. It was a different kind of pain. A pain I couldn't stand. I tried not to think. I just started writing.
-
Songwriting never gets old. There's always stuff to write about.
