Writing Quotes
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I first started writing fiction in college because I was attracted to beautiful sentences. I loved to read them. I wanted to write them.
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My job, in general, is nonfiction, so writing fiction was liberating. If you can't find the answer to something, you just make it up!
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I haven't thought about writing so much as potentially producing and finding my own projects to get into production. I want to be able to buy the rights to a story that I have read or a book that I have read.
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Writing is so fun precisely because if you take out the right adjective, the readers can decide what kind of book is in their hands. Suspension of disbelief should not be mandatory in contemporary writing.
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When I was writing 'The Satanic Verses,' if you had asked me about the phenomenon that we all now know as radical Islam, I wouldn't have had much to say. As recently as the mid-1980s, it didn't seem to be a big deal.
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While I was writing 'Stick Out Your Tongue' in Beijing, the police began knocking on my door again. As soon as I finished the book, I moved to Hong Kong so that I could work undisturbed on my next novel.
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My writing was liberated once I abandoned acting.
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Honestly, I envy painters, who can have a masterpiece in one morning. Or musicians, who can write something in 30 minutes and arrange it in an hour, sometimes. 'Cause with this, with writing, you can occasionally feel like a caveman, like you've been working with pitch and tar on this brush.
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Writing on your own is, in a way, a very lonely profession. There's no one there to help you.
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I think I began to like writing a lot more, and to be a better writer, when I did it for a while alone. It made me a little more confident about my style.
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There is no such thing as Christian art or secular art - writing, painting, drawing, whatever it is.
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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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The writing that feels the best to me, I experience sometimes, is a kind of weirdly deep listening - like, it feels like if you just listen hard enough, the next sentence will tell you what it needs to be.
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I don't think of myself as a folk singer per se, but I really like blues and string-band music. When I started listening to records when II've been writing about growing old for some time, really from the beginning of my career. It's something I'm apparently hung up about and now that I am old, hopefully I speak about it with some authority. was a teenager, the folk boom was going on.
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I literally left school and went straight into music via art college for a year, and I've been so involved in my job of writing songs that the more actively involved part became channeled into standing on the stage and saying things that way.
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I always tell audiences when I talk about writing: Writing isn't something I do; writing is something that I am. I am writing - it's just an expression of me.
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The listeners who buy books after a reading multiply that reading; the author who realizes that he or she may be writing on a blank page but is at least not speaking to a blank wall may be encouraged by the experience, and write more.
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Writing is a very strenuous thing - it's like banging your head against a wall. At the end of the day, acting is better, just because nobody ever asked me if I wanted a Pellegrino in the writer's room.
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I like to write first-person because I like to become the character I'm writing.
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Writing is challenging work because it's so easy to get consumed with how it's going, what's going to happen to it, who's going to like or not like it. You want to get all of that stuff out of your head and just let the work flow.
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I used to like writing for comedians - I enjoyed the challenge of making other people funny.
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A man who publishes his letters becomes a nudist - nothing shields him from the world's gaze except his bare skin. A writer, writing away, can always fix things up to make himself more presentable, but a man who has written a letter is stuck with it for all time.
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I like singing all songs, really, but I find that writing social commentary comes naturally.
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It was hard for my father to read; it took him a long time, but he had tremendous retention and tremendous appreciation for writing.
