Writing Quotes
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I usually write for the individual reader -though I would like to have many such readers. There are some poets who write for people assembled in big rooms, so they can live through something collectively. I prefer my reader to take my poem and have a one-on-one relationship with it.
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Writing isn't about the destination-writing is the journey that transforms the soul and gives meaning to all else.
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I'm doing one of three things: I'm writing. I'm staring out the window. Or I'm writhing on the floor.
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The only other thing which I think is important is: Don't write a book or start a book with the expectation of communicating a message in a very important way.
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It's hard to see a film one time and really "get it," and write fully and intelligently about it. That's a review. That's not film criticism.
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I don't think I'm a great actress. I think I can act or I can react. Coming from a musical background and being a dramatic singer and writer, when I write stuff I really feel it. So I sing it like it comes from here. That's how I do the acting.
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I have a writing addiction.
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You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time. A lot of the people whose work they’ve taught in the schools for the last thirty years, I can’t understand why people read them and why they are taught.
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I write to be truthful in my songs, which is why I wrote what's painfully truthful about my life in my autobiography.
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The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.
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Songwriting as an art is a bit archaic now. Just writing a song is not good enough.
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Things that I have a hard time being able to fully grasp, sometimes writing the poem helps me work through it. Or I get to the end of the poem and I still haven't figured anything out, but at least I have a new poem out of it.
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Writing is such a solitary existence, and I can only do it late at night.
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It was writing about music for NPR - connecting with music fans and experiencing a sense of community - that made me want to write songs again. I began to feel I was in my head too much about music, too analytical.
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You may be somebody who writes best for a small press that doesn't pay very well, but you might have a fascinating and intricate style that might not appeal to as many readers but will be incredibly meaningful to the readers you have. Truly, that's as wonderful if not more wonderful.
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What I miss today more than anything else - I don't go to church as much anymore - but that old-time religion, that old singing, that old praying which I love so much. That is the great strength of my being, of my writing.
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Because I wake up late, my day is often short. I'm much more active in the evenings, during which I alternately read, write, needle-point, smoke, email, and despair over my decision last June to put my television and DVD player out on the street because I wasn't getting enough work done.
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You go out into the world, you read everything you can read, you imitate the things you love, and you learn how hard it is to do. Eventually, you learn your own vision of the world, you learn your own voice and how to hear it, and you learn to write your own work. Writers today have as many opportunities as my generation did, but they don't see the examples as clearly as we did.
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The world was going on as usual. All the time she was writing the world had continued.
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If anything, my problem is, I'm not a genius, it's just that I can write songs very quick. I have a lot of ideas, let's put it that way - I have too many ideas. And my problem is, I stockpile ideas and I get lazy and I don't finish them, and next thing I know, I'm looking around and I've got a hundred song ideas, but are any of them any good? I don't know.
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The business of writing is one of the four or five most private things in the world.
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You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year
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I did some writing. I was just taking the kids to school. I did a couple things and we did some tours. It was a lot of downtime.
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I don’t write things to benefit the world. If it happens that they do, swell. I didn’t set out to do that. I set out to have a hell of a lot of fun.
