Writing Quotes
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I have an amazing team; I have amazing producers; I have amazing writers, but at the end of it, it's me making the decisions on the writing, the tone, the editing.
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What it is is that comedy is underrepresented in every actor's life, because it's so bloody difficult to write. Anyone can write, and then you leave it to special effects to make it look good. But comedy, you've got to do some writing.
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This writing wasn't painful. It was like being high.
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On July 26, 1916, I announced to all my friends in America that from now on I resolved to write no more poems in the classical language, and to begin my experiments in writing poetry in the so-called vulgar tongue of the people.
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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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My forte is playing along and singing along to music I love. I mean, who knows, maybe I could develop that knack or develop that ability to write, and I do actually co-write with people and friends, which is fun, too, because then I don't have to worry about writing lyrics, because for me writing lyrics is impossible.
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There's the underlying feeling that writing must be easy, because it's all about putting letters together. That's only true in the same way that programming is all about putting numbers together.
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I would much rather not be the center of attention, and I'd much rather travel and be writing my novel, rather than standing on a stage and trying to get people to understand something.
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When I write something simple I'm always really proud of it. When you write something that simple with that much air in it and the whole premise behind it is something pretty obvious - that everybody wants to be happy and free - the song is sort of an exercise in not forgetting that's what you really want and what you really need. We can get caught up in a lot of other stuff.
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Every composer's music reflects in its subject-matter and in its style the source of the money the composer is living on while writing the music.
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There are times when I want to be plainspoken about my feelings in a song. But there are other times when it's really good to try and get my head around different kinds of song structures, or maybe I might get turned on by trying to write a song that would fit in this one scene in a movie. And by the end of all this, you just end up with a bunch of different ideas. And songs are really just ideas.
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Few things in life are less efficient than a group of people trying to write a sentence. The advantage of this method is that you end up with something for which you will not be personally blamed.
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With directing, your day is done. When you hit seven o'clock, it's "Cut." That's what it is. For better or worse, that's what you've got and you have to make that work, and there's something incredibly liberating about that because you can't torture yourself. You have to focus on the moment, and you have to embrace every second and opportunity and maximize that, whereas with writing, there's no imperative there. You just amble along.
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I write the songs first and in most cases teach myself the technique second.
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In writing if it takes over 30 minutes to write the first two paragraphs select another subject.
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To write, you must first belong to yourself.
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I think writer's block is simply the dread that you are going to write something horrible. But as a writer, I believe that if you sit down at the keys long enough, sooner or later something will come out.
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I might be like a conductor, or I collect the stuff together and I do a lot of my own writing. But what is a pleasure is the whole creative thing in which we're all excavating and trying to find something.
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In my writing class, we never, ever talk about the writing - ever. We never address a story that's been read. I also won't let anyone look at the person who's reading. No eye contact; everybody has to draw a spiral. And I would like to do a drawing class where we could talk about anything except for the drawing. No one could even mention it.
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When Howard Marks came out of prison, years later, I met him at a concert in South Wales; I was a young whippersnapper and Howard was kind of an outlaw hero. I said to him - and it's on tape, a cousin of his filmed our meeting - I said, "If you write a book, I want to play you in a movie." He said, "Let's shake on it," and we did. Thirteen years later, there we were, making the movie.
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A lot of love records or breakup records, a lot of the songs can tend to be on the blame side and the bitter side. And this was good for me, writing, because it made me feel like I was forcing myself to be more mature and grow up a little bit. It's not putting the blame on anybody, it's accepting responsibility just as much as the other person.
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I was enjoying myself writing, because I don't know what's going to happen when I take a ride around that corner. You don't know at all what you're going to find there. That can be thrilling when you read a book, especially when you're a kid and you're reading stories.
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A man would never get the notion of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male.
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My writing is nothing, my boxing is everything.
