Writing Quotes - Page 120

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

I had neither expert aid nor advice. I studied no courses in writing; until a year or so ago, I never read a book by anybody advising writers how to write.

Listening to critics is like letting Muhammad Ali decide which astronaut goes to the moon.

The most ordinary word, when put into place, suddenly acquires brilliance. That is the brilliance with which your images must shine.

Being a fiction writer is really like being an actor, because if you're going to write convincingly it has to sound right and play right. The only way that works is to emotionally and technically act out and see the scene you're in. There's no better job in the world, because when I sit down at that computer I'm the world's best forensics expert, if that's what I'm writing about that day. Or I'm some crazed psycho running down a dark alley. Or I'm a gorgeous woman looking to find a man that night. Whatever! But I'm all of those things, every day. How can you beat that?

That 'writers write' is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all.

I think it's the real world. The people we're writing about in professional sports, they're suffering and living and dying and loving and trying to make their way through life just as the brick layers and politicians are.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

There are a lot of bad screenplays so if you write a good screenplay people are going to respond to it.

Fool," said my muse to me. "Look in thy heart and write.

After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.

God writes the story of our lives with the pen strokes of our own free choices.

Freedom is...the right to write the wrong words.

I want to write for people that are trying to do some kind of quality music. What I mean by quality music is not so much the trend, what is hot right now. I don't write trendy, I write what feels good and something that feels good will never get old. Timeless music is what I try to shoot for.

Whether you're keeping a journal or writing as a meditation, it's the same thing. What's important is you're having a relationship with your mind.

The writing in mathematics text is not only laconic to a fault; it is cold, monotonous, dry, dull, and even ungrammatical... The books are not only printed by machines; they are written by machines.

Young people today have lots of experience ... interacting with new technologies, but a lot less so of creating [or] expressing themselves with new technologies. It's almost as if they can read but not write.

The things I'm saying in my records are always me. I write about things in my life that I'm experiencing. When you hear the personal meaningful records that aren't about partying, they stem from my life.

It's so easy to get caught up in your own self-doubt when you're writing. It can be so easy to tell yourself, "Who am I kidding?"

Anyone can write. But comedy, you've got to do some writing. You get one comedy script to every 20 dramas.

You don't impress the officials at NASA with a paper airplane. You don't boast about your crayon sketches in the presence of Picasso. You don't claim equality with Einstein because you can write 'H20.' And you don't boast about your goodness in the presence of the Perfect.

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking - and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.

For the creation of a masterwork of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment.

A great reader seldom recognizes his solitude.