Writing Quotes
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We have to look at the figures of speech a writer uses, his images and symbols, to realize that underneath all the complexity of human life that uneasy stare at an alien nature is still haunting us, and the problem of surmounting it still with us.
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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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When your writing is unselfconscious, when it comes from your heart, that's when it's powerful.
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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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On a piece of paper, write down the thing that is stressing you, the obstacle that is in your way. Then put it in a box and just leave it there. At the end of about a week, dispose of it - throw it in the trash or bury it - some sort of ritualistic act of releasing it.
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It's hard to write sex because it's hard to write desire, period.
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I have no desire to write anything for screen. That's a great talent.
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I'm like part of the Kurt Cobain school of writing lyrics, which is the syntax of the words is more important than... is where it all comes from.
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Writing is done alone. People do not talk about the things they do alone.
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For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.
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Sometimes it takes time to get into what ideas actually mean to you. Even when you're not writing a song, it's like that.
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Writers collect stories of rituals: John Cheever putting on a jacket and tie to go down to the basement, where he kept a desk near the boiler room. Keats buttoning up his clean white shirt to write in, after work.
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I never imagined I'd write a book.
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The Internet has been the most fundamental change during my lifetime and for hundreds of years. Someone the other day said, "It's the biggest thing since Gutenberg," and then someone else said "No, it's the biggest thing since the invention of writing."
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I like to write things to be personal, so I just put what I'm thinking about at the time.
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I started writing as soon as I started reading.
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I never know the endings when I write. It's a turnoff when you know the ending. You lose much of your incentive to write when you already know. It's like seeing a movie a second time.
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I swear I have at least one good song idea a day. But if I don't get pen to paper in ten seconds, it's gone forever.
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Somebody informed me recently that the key to every art, from writing to gardening to sculpture, is creativity. I beg to differ.
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The music kind of takes care of itself because we've done all that as preproduction in the practice room. So by the time it gets onstage, each song has about one hundred hours of way too much mothering gone into it. So when you see us play live, that is the product of ninety days of practice, over a year of writing, listening to demos on the weekends after practice.
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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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Writing as writing. Writing as rioting. Writing as righting.
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I'm really happy that people are starting to hear my band, and we are so happy to be conduits for all this other happiness, and this emotional response. So, I can't be like, "that doesn't matter to me, I'm an artist, I exist apart from that!" But on the other hand, if you buy into that too much, you're setting yourself up... if I start thinking, "well, people at the show really liked one song, maybe I should write more songs like that," then I'm in trouble.
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We need to write because so many of our stories are not being heard. Where could they be heard in this era of fear and media monopolies? Writing allows us to transform what has happened to us and to fight back against what's hurting us. While not everyone is an author, everyone is a writer and I think that the process of writing is deeply spiritual and liberatory.
