Writing Quotes - Page 134

In general, I feel, or I have come to feel, that the richest writing comes not from the people who dedicate themselves to writing alone. I know this is contradicted again and again but I continue to feel it. They don't, of course, write as much, or as fast, but I think it is riper and more satisfying when it does come. One of the difficulties of writing or doing any kind of creative work in America seems to me to be that we put such stress on production and material results. We put a time pressure and a mass pressure on creative work which are meaningless and infantile in that field.

If you want to write what the world is about, you have to write details...real life is in the dishes. Real life is pushing strollers up the street, folding T-shirts, the alarm clock going off early and you dropping into bed exhausted every night. That's real life.

A book is simply the container of an idea-like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters.

I'm writing songs with the hope someone can get behind my feeling.

If you want to write you should learn the alphabet. You write and write and in the end you hava a beautiful, perfect alphabet. But it isn’t the alphabed that is important. The important thing is what you are writing, what you are expressing. The same thing goes for photography. Photographs can be technically perfect and even beautiful, but they have no expression.

The invention of photography has dealt a mortal blow to the old modes of expression, in painting as well as in poetry, where automatic writing, which appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, is a true photography of thought. Since a blind instrument now assured artists of achieving the aim they had set themselves up to that time, they now aspired, not without recklessness, to break with the imitation of appearances.

The savants will write excellent volumes. There will be laureates. But wars will continue just the same until the forces of the circumstances render them impossible.

Sometimes writing songs is like waiting for deliveries.

Sometimes my brain writes a check that reality can't cash.

Why do I write books? Why do I think? Why should I be passionate? Because things could be different, they could be made better.

I want less and less control with music. Just playing music without any idea of composition or writing.

I am never going to have anything more to do with politics or politicians. When this war is over I shall confine myself entirely to writing and painting.

There're no novels that I like to read so I write my own novels, and then I read them again, and it's the best thing.

Don’t say you were a bit confused and sort of tired and a little depressed and somewhat annoyed. Be tired. Be confused. Be depressed. Be annoyed. Don’t hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident.

As a writer one doesn’t belong anywhere. Fiction writers, I think, are even more outside the pale, necessarily on the edge of society. Because society and people are our meat, one really doesn’t belong in the midst of society. The great challenge in writing is always to find the universal in the local, the parochial. And to do that, one needs distance.

Make me a willow cabin at your gate, And call upon my soul within the house; Write loyal cantons of contemned love And sing them loud even in the dead of night.

You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I'm creating an imaginary - it's always imaginary - world in which I would like to live.

I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.

You have to protect your writing time. You have to protect it to the death.

The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.

A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.

Writing is learning to say nothing, more cleverly every day.

It is better to write a bad first draft than to write no first draft at all.

I thought I would write something that would make some people uncomfortable. . . . What intrigued me, I think, was the idea of women of my own generation who were successful, intelligent, coming to power and suddenly in the public arena. I started to think about what they are allowed and what they are not allowed.

Write on my gravestone: 'Infidel, Traitor.', infidel to every church that compromises with wrong; traitor to every government that oppresses the people.