Writing Quotes - Page 128

I never considered myself part of rock 'n' roll. My stuff was more adult. It was more difficult for teenagers to relate to; my stuff was filled with more despair than anything you'd associate with rock 'n' roll. Since I couldn't see people dancing, I didn't write jitterbugs or twists. I wrote rhythms that moved me. My style requires pure heart singing.

It takes writing a billion bad words before you get to the good ones.

A recurring ideal, I find, is that of simplicity. At times there comes the desire to write with great precision and clarity, words so simple and moving that they bring tears to the eyes.

Normally, I spend a week on the outline and take two weeks to write the book.

A man is not learned until he can read, write and swim.

I think e-mail is kind of a cheap way to communicate. It's a lazy way of writing a letter, you know.

Somebody said to me, 'But the Beatles were anti-materialistic.' That's a huge myth. John and I literally used to sit down and say, 'Now, let's write a swimming pool.'

The age is materialistic. Verse isn't. I must be with the age, so I am writing prose.

It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader. If you do not believe in the characters or the story you are doing at that moment with all your mind, strength, and will, if you don't feel joy and excitement while writing it, then you're wasting good white paper, even if it sells, because there are other ways in which a writer can bring in the rent money besides writing bad or phony stories.

If I didn't have writing, I'd be running down the street hurling grenades in people's faces.

Musicians always have music in their heads about their perceptions of the world.

I don't write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

I'm me, and I'm here, and I'm writing.

Good writing is like a bomb: it explodes in the face of the reader.

Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day.

All is fair in love and songwriting.

The will to originality is not the will to be peculiar and unlike anybody else; it means the desire to derive one's consciousness from its primary source.

It was a revelation for me, in a practical sense, that you could write in an African language and still reach an audience beyond that language through the art of translation.

Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.

Choose your tools carefully, but not so carefully that you get uptight or spend more time at the stationery store than at your writing table.

First, consider the pen you write with. It should be a fast-writing pen because your thoughts are always much faster than your hand. You don't want to slow up your hand even more with a slow pen. A ballpoint, a pencil, a felt tip, for sure, are slow. Go to a stationery store and see what feels good to you. Try out different kinds. Don't get too fancy and expensive. I mostly use a cheap Sheaffer fountain pen, about $1.95.... You want to be able to feel the connection and texture of the pen on paper.

And the stuff that I write, is even tougher than dykes.

Write it down. Written goals have a way of transforming wishes into wants; cant's into cans; dreams into plans; and plans into reality. Don't just think it - ink it!

My writing is consistently influenced by everything I watched and listened to growing up, so it's just this crazy collage of everything.