Writing Quotes
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I have to trick myself into writing a story - impose some arbitrary constraint to distract me from the constraints of my past habits or my fear that I don't have much to say.
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I'm writing for entertainment. I like people to reach the end and feel they got their money's worth.
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To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.
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How can you stop writing?
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I'm a lazy writer. My idea of heaven is not writing. On the other hand, I'm obviously compulsive about it.
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I enjoy what I do every minute of the day, even when the going gets tough. When I first began writing, I used to work at a desk in the bedroom, of a small development house. My three sons all under the age of 3 would come running in and out of the room every minute.
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Blogging has mostly been an opportunity to react more immediately to experiences to try out ideas that I may end up using in the print media or in some other place. When I write books, it's a way for me to bring readers into the experience of writing the book, all through the process of writing the books that I write. I talk about what I'm up to in the blog. I let people know what I am doing. To me, it's just part of putting my professional life up in a way that people who are interested in it can access; and learning things from them as well.
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One of the things I learnt over the years is that there is a craft to writing, like there is a craft to acting. I hadn't done my apprenticeship as a writer. I did try to be a writer for hire but I'm not any good at it.
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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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You can't expect someone who has been in prison his whole entire life to turn around and become a sweet guy who writes books and walks his dog and has a normal life.
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Elephants are my favourite creatures and have been since I was a boy and my mother read Kipling's The Elephant's Child to me. It was loving elephants so much that made we want to write my own story with an elephant at the centre and its bond with a child.
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Writing a book is like running a marathon. You need to be fit to do it, mentally and, as far as possible, physically.
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When Walt Whitman writes in seeming defiance of tradition, he needs tradition for his protection, for the butcher and the baker and the candlestick-maker grow merry over him when they meet his work by chance.
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We, Autolux band, write in very different ways; sometimes we play with the band and write music first and then form vocal parts and lyrics. Or I'll find some music, or a guitar part or something, and I'll just write an entire sketch of an idea from that. So I think things have always been that way, it's just that this time around we had some more obstacles off and on all the time.
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Literature has low enough standards. But we can avoid writing the worst literature if we make ourselves ask ourselves, every two or three sentences we write, 'Is that what I really think?'
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Once I've written something it does tend to run away from me. I don't seem to have any part of it - it's no longer my piece of writing.
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I started writing my own plays, and I would sell out, but after everything was said and done, I'd break even. That's being successful.
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I needed it to have experiences I could write about. I thought I was someone who had nothing to say.
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I had to see and feel and be with the thing that I wanted to write about.
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Writing a book, just like building a library, is an act of sheer defiance. It is a declaration that you believe in the persistence of memory.
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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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We all rely on technology to communicate, to survive, to do our banking, to shop, to get informed, but none of us knows how to read and write the code.
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The main thing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. Take off from here.
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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.
