Writing Quotes - Page 113

My father, Benjamin Shiller, told me not to believe in authorities or celebrities - that society tends to imagine them as superhuman. It's good advice. People are snowed by celebrities all the time. In academia people have this idea of achieving stardom - publishing in the best journals, being at the best university, writing on the hot topic everyone else is writing about. But that's what my father told me not to do. He taught me that you have to pursue things that sound right to you.

Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.

All the fun is in how you say a thing.

Be your own teacher. Let life write your textbook.

I could have made money this way, and perhaps amused myself writing code. But I knew that at the end of my career, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had spent my life making the world a worse place.

Our poets do not write about it; our artists do not try to portray this remarkable thing. I don't know why. Is nobody inspired by our present picture of the universe? The value of science remains unsung by singers... This is not yet a scientific age.

If you go too far in fantasy and break the string of logic, and become nonsensical, someone will surely remind you of your dereliction....Pound for pound, fantasy makes a tougher opponent for the creative person.

The moment a man sets his thoughts down on paper, however secretly, he is in a sense writing for publication.

When God writes our names in the 'Lamb's Book of Life' He doesn't do it with an eraser handy. He does it for eternity.

I've always considered myself a filmmaker who writes stuff for himself to do.

Music is very, very important in my movies. In some ways the most important stage, whether it ends up being in the movie or not, is just when I come up with the idea itself before I have actually sat down and started writing. I go into my record room... I have a big vinyl collection and I have a room kind of set up like a used record store and I just dive into my music, whether it be rock music, or lyric music, or my soundtrack collection. What I'm looking for is the spirit of the movie, the beat that the movie will play with.

Write to the mind and heart, and let the ear Glean after what it can.

To do an extreme metal record is something that is well within my capacity as a musician to write stuff out of the box, write stuff that's probably more extreme than the band I'm in at the present time, and it's something that needs to come out of me one way or another.

I stay way from that area, and there's only so many songs you can write about love, sex and death.

Sometimes I write drunk and revise sober, and sometimes I write sober and revise drunk. But you have to have both elements in creation — the Apollonian and the Dionysian, or spontaneity and restraint, emotion and discipline.

I think people who create and write, it actually does flow-just flows from into their head, into their hand, and they write it down. It's simple.

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear. If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable. But when you want to say something life-changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent of your own talent.

I keep writing children’s books, I keep making children’s books, because I still have them inside of me.

Authors of all races, be they Greeks, Romans, Teutons, or Celts, Can't seem just to say anything is the thing it is but have to go out of their way to say that it is like something else.

Everyone thinks they can write a play; you just write down what happened to you. But the art of it is drawing from all the moments of your life.

"Only write what you know" is very good advice. I do my best to stick to it. I wrote about gods and dreams and America because I knew about them. And I wrote about what it's like to wander into Faerie because I knew about that. I wrote about living underneath London because I knew about that too. And I put people into the stories because I knew them: the ones with pumpkins for heads, and the serial killers with eyes for teeth, and the little chocolate people filled with raspberry cream and the rest of them.

So maybe part of our formal education should be training in empathy. Imagine how different the world would be if, in fact, that were 'reading, writing, arithmetic, empathy.'

I don't know why, but there's a certain element of panic in writing lyrics that I'm not sure I enjoy. I don't write lyrics first, ever. I've never done that. So, in a sense, the lyrics are a bit of an afterthought - it's music first.

Write your future in pencil…Be prepared. Plan for the future. But also be ready to pivot if a new opportunity comes your way, or if you discover something that was not part of the master plan– makes your heart sing and your mind buzz with possibilities.

In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is, rather, a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears.