Writing Quotes - Page 100

I'm a very melody-driven writer and I have a rule that I don't write anything down because if I can't remember the melody than it wasn't worth remembering. So it's my way to test myself in the studio. When I was a kid I could sing pretty well so melody always made a lot of sense to me.

A man who has any relish for fine writing either discovers new beauties or receives stronger impressions from the masterly strokes of a great author every time he peruses him; besides that he naturally wears himself into the same manner of speaking and thinking.

Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do...Try to be better than yourself.

An outline is crucial. It saves so much time. When you write suspense, you have to know where you're going because you have to drop little hints along the way. With the outline, I always know where the story is going. So before I ever write, I prepare an outline of 40 or 50 pages.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

It was not in my nature to be an assertive person. I was used to looking to others for guidance, for influence, sometimes for the most basic cues of life. And yet writing stories is one of the most assertive things a person can do. Fiction is an act of willfulness, a deliberate effort to reconceive, to rearrange, to reconstitute nothing short of reality itself. Even among the most reluctant and doubtful of writers, this willfulness must emerge. Being a writer means taking the leap from listening to saying, "Listen to me."

Apollo without Dionysus may indeed be a well-informed, good citizen but he's a dull fellow. He may even be 'cultured,' in the sense one often gets from traditionalist writings in education. . . . But without Dionysus he will never make and remake a culture.

God understands more about the financial markets than many who write about them.

I would be lost without the feeling of antagonism that people have towards me. I write out of defiance.

Make sure to immediately write down any impressions you receive. Intuitive impressions are often subtle and therefore 'evaporate' very quickly, so make sure to capture them in writing as soon as possible. Recent research in neuroscience indicates that an intuitive insight - or any new idea - not captured within 37 seconds is likely never to be recalled again. In 7 minutes, it's gone forever. As my buddy Mark Victor Hansen likes to say, 'As soon as you think it, ink it!'

Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.

If I write what my soul thinks it will be visible, and the words will be its body.

My parents offered me my first camera for my birthday and I developed an exclusive passion for it over the years. Since I was not the most social kid on the block, the camera helped me to express myself, invent my own language - something like a secret garden. I decided early on I would not write in a diary but take silent photographs instead.

Strum your guitar sing it kid Just write about your feelings not the things you never did Inexperience, it once had cursed me But your youth is no handicap it's what makes you thirsty

People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach us how to talk to other people: it teaches us how to talk to ourselves. What I'm desperately trying to do is to get students to talk to themselves as though they are indeed themselves, and not someone else.

Writing a book isn’t an easy process nor is it always enjoyable, but it is one of life’s most satisfying achievements.

A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.

Books fall open, you fall in. When you climb out again, you're a bit larger than you used to be.

A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.

God has condescended to become an author, and yet people will not read his writings. There are very few that ever gave this Book of God, the grand charter of salvation, one fair reading through.

Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.

If you can write a nation's stories, you needn't worry about who makes its laws. Today, television tells most of the stories to most of the people most of the time.

It is difficult to write about any form of mental disease, especially your own, without sounding as if you were examining a bug under glass.

I'm fairly convinced that the Kingdom of God is for the broken-hearted. You write of 'powerlessness.' Join the club, we are not in control. God is.

"Very" is the most useless word in the English language and can always come out. More than useless, it is treacherous because it invariably weakens what it is intended to strengthen. For example, would you rather hear the mincing shallowness of "I love you very much" or the heart-slamming intensity of "I love you"?