Writing Quotes
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The thing that makes writing so difficult is you don't have the element of serendipity. At least with a photograph, you can set up the camera, and something might happen. You might be a lousy photographer, but you can get a good picture if you just take enough of them.
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I had been writing poems and stories since I learned to make letters. I had placed poems in a hardcover anthology at the age of 6. And I knew more big words than anyone else in the 10th grade.
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The hardest part of writing 'William Shakespeare's Star Wars' was probably the sheer amount of iambic pentameter and tiptoeing around certain scenes I knew would be hot-button issues for 'Star Wars' fans.
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When I was living in Mexico and writing a book called 'Aztec,' I had to make a deliberate effort to ignore a lot of the 'typically Mexican landscape' around me - banana and citrus groves, roses and carnations, burros and toros - because they did not exist in Mexico in the 15th century, the time of my book.
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My writing was liberated once I abandoned acting.
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I guess what led to me writing 'Holes' was having moved to Texas in 1991, and it was sort of my reaction to Texas.
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I am in no way a confident person - except when it comes to what I'm writing. It's just like, this is what I can do, and I have what I think is a pretty strong voice, for better or worse. It's the style I like to write in.
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There is no other way of writing a novel than to begin at the beginning at to continue to the end.
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I usually start writing a novel that I then abandon. When I say abandon, I don't think any writer ever abandons anything that they regard as even a half-good sentence. So you recycle. I mean, I can hang on to a sentence for several years and then put it into a book that's completely different from the one it started in.
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Most writers battle with periods of being blocked; it's almost an occupational hazard. But in the writing of his last and greatest novel, 'A Passage to India,' E. M. Forster got stuck for nine years.
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'(Songwriting) It's a gift. It all comes from somewhere. I started out really young, when I was four, five, six, writing poems, before I could play an instrument. I was writing about things when I was eight or 10 years old that I hadn't lived long enough to experience.'
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I want to direct films, because I am a painter and a sculptor and I've done a lot of writing.
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Writing is a way of living. It doesn't quite matter that there are too many books for the number of readers in the world to read them. It's a way of being alive for the writer.
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The writer's job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them.
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If you feel bored or uncomfortable as you're writing, ask yourself what's bothering you and write about that. Sometimes your creative energy is like water in a kinked hose, and before thoughts can flow on the topic at hand, you have to straighten the hose by attending to whatever is preoccupying you.
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The ego being shattered is not what frightens me - that can be useful for writing - but the ego being inflated is sort of like it dying of gout.
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There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
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There are no rules to writing a song.
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I suppose half of writing is overcoming the revulsion you feel when you sit down to it.
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I don't really need to stand out, there's room for everyone. Although I haven't built a niche yet, I'm just writing love songs.
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I can't read novels while I'm writing a novel, because somebody's voice creeps in.
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The main characters for 'The Seer and the Sword' made an appearance one night and then haunted me for over five years before I began to write them down. Does that count as inspiration? For me, characters tend to show up, stay on to help with the work of writing their stories, and then occasionally deign to visit after a book is finished.
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Write till your ink be dry, and with your tears Moist it again, and frame some feeling line That may discover such integrity.
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Prose is like this big block - you write big paragraphs. I feel that when I'm reading and writing, that a prose book is kind of monolithic. But a song is more like a feather or something.
