Writing Quotes
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I decided that, if I were to write a teen series, I'd want to set it in a place that was familiar to me - Manhattan, where I'd grown up - and I'd model the characters on myself and my friends.
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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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Even when I'm writing plays I enjoy having company and mentally I think of that company as the company I'm writing for.
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I'm so thankful I can write songs. I can capture all those memories in my songs and keep those memories alive.
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By the end of the time I'm writing a book, I'm tearing my hair out and I want to go do stand-up. And then I want to do something else. I don't know why it is true with me that I can't just be satisfied doing the one thing, but I'm constantly flitting from one thing to another.
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I've often said to myself, "Thank God I can write, 'cause this is hilarious." I actually wanted to go into all that more in the book, but my editor thought it was too crazy.
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If you're not engaged in the writing and it doesn't grab you then you just don't want to do it.
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I feel quite at home writing short stories but nervous and anxious when writing novels, as if the bad time of consecutive failures might arise again.
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You can't learn to write that way - by writing directly for the screen. Wait until you're 30. But in the meantime write 200 short stories. You've got to learn how to write!
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I'd like to write the way I do my paintings, that is, as fantasy takes me, as the moon dictates.
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My stories run up and bite me on the leg - I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.
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Writing is fun - at least mostly. I write for four hours every day. After that I go running. As a rule, 10 kilometers (6.2 miles). That's easy to manage.
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This is a landmark work in the history of African American studies and American intellectual history. Writing with verve, Jackson brings to life a large cast of characters and traces an ongoing conversation among the writers and critics of this period. This book is likely to become a model for a new generation of scholars, both for the breadth of its engagement and the depth of its archival research.
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Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one's own pleasure is shared.
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I feel like women very often do write differently than men, but women write things that men can't write.
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Historical fiction is a collaboration between the time in which it's written and the time that it's writing about and the far future, when we don't know what people are going to think about yet.
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Whoever would write books? It's suffering as well as greatly satisfying. And certainly there's suffering in the sense that you don't know for a long time how to do it.
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You have to constantly arrange yourself around them, and that can take up a lot of energy. I mean, you don't go, "Why don't you cook dinner tonight, dear, for a change, instead of writing a great song?" I loved what [Paul Simon] did with words. But I wanted to do some more of that, too.
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It is forgetting, not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human. To make sense of the world, we must filter it. "To think," Borges writes, "is to forget.
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The Jungian therapist taught me the difference between the ego and the shadow. I realized I'd been so busy being a good girl that I'd completely detached from my shadow. It's something we all have, and it's where all the creative juices are.
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I don't like to read things that people write about me. I'd rather read what kids have to say about me, because it's not their profession to do that.
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I do a lot. I don't like to sit still. I am pretty spontaneous. I like to cook a lot. I like to eat. I like to workout, surf, read, write, and create. I am always working on a couple of projects that I always have and need to put more time into.
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If history moves forward, knowledge of it travels backwards, so that in writing of our own recent past we are continually meeting ourselves coming the other way.
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Like most little girls, I found the lure of grown-up accessories astonishing - lipstick, perfume, hats and gloves. When I write female characters in my historical novels, getting these details right is vital.
