Writing Quotes
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I was really into writing short fiction and also photography when I was a kid.
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Epithets, like pepper, Give zest to what you write; And if you strew them sparely, They whet the appetite: But if you lay them on too thick, You spoil the matter quite!
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I'm not saying that I don't experience people in life as evil, but writing is not a place of alienation; writing is the place where we can try to be human.
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By the end of the week, if I'm still alive, I get to write whatever I want about it all.
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Stand-up life is really hard. At one point, I got so paralyzed I could write five screenplays before I could write three jokes for stand-up. Later, I've finally allowed myself to relax quite a bit, to think I can do it because I've done it in the past. The pressure to come up with the material is the same but the anxiety about whether I can do it is gone.
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Never use the word, 'very.' It is the weakest word in the English language; doesn't mean anything. If you feel the urge of 'very' coming on, just write the word, 'damn,' in the place of 'very.' The editor will strike out the word, 'damn,' and you will have a good sentence.
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I feel uninhibited when I'm writing.
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I knew that I was writing for an American audience and that if I sold foreign rights, they would retranslate the book to make it make sense to that language. But one thing that was really important to me was not to italicize any of the words in the languages that were in the stories, because I feel like those foreign words felt just as important and integral to the story as everything else, so I wanted it all to just exist as its own thing.
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The real trouble with the writing game is that no general rule can be worked out for uniform guidance, and this applies to sales as well as to writing.
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When you're writing a sketch, it has to be surrounded by a situation. It can't just be out of the air.
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And there are people who want to be writers because they love to write. And they care.
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Every moment I choose to write about is one I have deemed important enough to dwell inside of and share with others. I am holding this moment up to the light and saying, "Wow, will you look at that?"
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Sometimes I'll ask the book writer to write a monologue, not to be performed, just as if they were notes for the character.
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When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write.
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Writing is a solitary activity, it requires isolation and silence.
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One of the hardest things about writing lyrics is to make the lyrics sit on the music in such a way that you're not aware there was a writer there.
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Joyce's writing in Dubliners contains some of the most unshowily beautiful sentences in the English language. I learned from him that if you write a good, clean line of English, you can get under a reader's skin. The reader won't even know why, but there you are. Didion, Berger, the many others I mentioned above, and many, many poets I haven't mentioned. Writers of this calibre are the moving targets the rest of us are always chasing.
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Deciding what is to be sung and what is not to be sung is really what writing a musical is about.
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I come to writing the same way I come to teaching, which is that my goal is always to create life-long readers.
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It's hard to decide how to match words to music. It's not like it's twice the work. It's always difficult for me to explain to the composer what I'm looking for. I'm not a professional; I lack even basic knowledge about writing music.
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Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers.
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Writing is something that you can never do as well as it can be done. It is a perpetual challenge and it is more difficult than anything else that I have ever done.
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You have to be very clear with yourself about how you're going to spend your time. When a child is at school or napping, you need to realize that this is your writing time and you don't spend it surfing the Internet or reading.
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I just like to express myself in the world around me. And I love writing, but sometimes it feels a little too minute. Sometimes, at the end of the day, there's just not enough colors involved - visually, there are just words on a page.
