Writing Quotes - Page 110

If you want to write for yourself, get a diary. If you want to write for your friends, get a blog. If you want to write for others...become an author.

I write, "Give me reason but don't give me choice, because I'll make the same mistake again." I think that's what most men want to be told.

Isn’t every human being both a scientist and an artist; and in writing of human experience, isn’t there a good deal to be said for recognizing that fact and for using both methods?

I remember standing on a street corner with the black painter Beauford Delaney down in the Village, waiting for the light to change, and he pointed down and said, 'Look.' I looked and all I saw was water. And he said, 'Look again,' which I did, and I saw oil on the water and the city reflected in the puddle. It was a great revelation to me. I can't explain it. He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw. Painters have often taught writers how to see. And once you've had that experience, you see differently.

Knowledge is the foundation and source of good writing. [Lat., Scibendi recte sapere est et principium et fons.]

Mathematics is a language. We want scientists to be able to read it, speak it, and write it. But we are are not training them to be grammarians.

Writing has... been to me like a bath from which I have risen feeling cleaner, healthier, and freer.

Letters were first invented for consoling such solitary wretches as myself. Having lost the substantial pleasures of seeing and possessing you, I shall in some measure compensate this loss by the satisfaction I shall find in your writing.

I don't give a damn what other people think. It's entirely their own business. I'm not writing for other people.

Whatever the thing you wish to say, there is but one word to express it, but one verb to give it movement, but one adjective to qualify it; you must seek until you find this noun, this verb, this adjective.

A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.

If you're writing songs by yourself, who's going to tell you if it's good or not? But if you're writing songs with somebody else, you get that immediate feedback.

A cop told me, a long time ago, that there’s no substitute for knowing what you’re doing. Most of us scribblers do not. The ones that’re any good are aware of this. The rest write silly stuff. The trouble is this: The readers know it.

Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child's Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox.

Just because somebody hears something you say, or reads something that you write, doesn't mean you've reached them. With reading comprehension being what it is in the U. S., you can safely toss that one out the window. If you want to judge by the listening habits of people who buy records, the first thing they do is put it on and talk over it.

Modern music is people who can't think signing artists who can't write songs to make records for people who can't hear.

A writer is essentially a man who does not resign himself to loneliness.

One of the awful things about writing when you are a Christian is that for you the ultimate reality is the Incarnation, the present reality is the Incarnation, and nobody believes in the Incarnation; that is, nobody in your audience. My audience are the people who think God is dead. At least these are the people I am conscious of writing for.

When I was younger I was much more polemical and didactic, much less trusting. Inherently my own vision of the world would weave its way through the characters. Also, my concerns are changing. What happens is you write a few plays and get boxed into some idea of what your concerns are and what you're supposed to be writing about.

There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.

It does not matter whether one paints a picture, writes a poem, or carves a statue - simplicity is the mark of a master-hand.

I really think I write about everyday life. I don't think I'm quite as odd as others say I am. Life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does; that's what makes it so boring.

People often ask me how long it takes me to write a play, and I tell them 'all of my life.'

I'm a person who is always trying to write in a different vein.

It helps to be able to be alone. 'Cuz writing is done alone, unless you collaborate, but I don't do that. Ask my ex-wife.