Writing Quotes - Page 112

The choreographic process is exhausting. It happens on one's feet after hours of work, and the energy required is roughly the equivalent of writing a novel and winning a tennis match simultaneously.

I have been lately introduced to the famous Thomas Paine, and like him very well. He is vain beyond all belief, but he has reason to be vain, and for my part I forgive him. He has done wonders for the cause of liberty, both in America and Europe, and I believe him to be conscientiously an honest man. He converses extremely well; and I find him wittier in discourse than in his writings, where his humour is clumsy enough.

I write pretty much every day, but I don't have any desire to publish anything.

The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that’s already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what—these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence. And they usually occur in proportion to the education and rank.

Writing is truly a creative art - putting word to a blank piece of paper and ending up with a full-fledged story rife with character and plot.

There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing... I am a recording instrument... I do not presume to impose "story" "plot" "continuity"... Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function... I am not an entertainer.

It’s not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word

You must learn to overcome your very natural and appropriate revulsion for your own work.

The process of writing a novel is like taking a journey by boat. You have to continually set yourself on course. If you get distracted or allow yourself to drift, you will never make it to the destination. It's not like highly defined train tracks or a highway; this is a path that you are creating discovering. The journey is your narrative. Keep to it and there will be a tale told.

I'll never live to write all the stories I have in my head.

If only she could put them together, she felt, write them out in some sentence, then she would have got at the truth of things.

Writing stopped being fun when I discovered the difference between good writing and bad and, even more terrifying, the difference between it and true art. And after that, the whip came down.

A piece of writing is a dangerous thing," he said. "It can change your life.

The liberty of speaking and writing guards our other liberties.

Writing is the only place I can be myself and not feel judged.

We stayed at home to write, to consolidate our outstretched selves.

People I know who succeed don't mind working. Those who are competent seem to like doing things well -- not stopping because they haven't accomplished what they wanted to on the first go-round. They're willing to do it twenty times, if necessary. There's an illusion that the good people can easily do something, and it's not necessarily true. They're just determined to do it right. I was impressed by hearing one of the women at Radcliffe talk about writing a poem, how many revisions a single poem sometimes has to go through -- fifty or sixty revisions to come out with a poem sixteen lines long.

If a word in the dictionary were misspelled, how would we know?

Advice to writers: Sometimes you just have to stop writing. Even before you begin.

I've always worked on all different types of music, some with specific project goals and deadlines and some not. Sometimes I would write a piece of music that is almost like a film score or weird electro pieces, wherever the muse took me, and I still do that.

When I graduated college I needed to make money while I was pursuing acting, so I read screenplays and made a living writing coverage on them for studios.

Plagiarists are always suspicious of being stolen from.

Language is the dress of thought.

a good writer should draw the reader in by starting in the middle of the story with a hook, then go back and fill in what happened before the hook. Once you have the reader hooked, you can write whatever you want as you slowly reel them in.

If I'm grumpy I sure do enjoy writing The Walking Dead.