Writing Quotes - Page 137

When I say writing, O believe me, it is rewriting that I have chiefly in mind.

This is not a screenplay. I don't do twenty drafts. I'm not going to show this to you until it's published or accepted for publication. You can make whatever suggestions you want, but I probably will ignore them entirely.

I like writing because you can make things happen and turn out the way they never do in real life.

Write every day. Don't ever stop. If you are unpublished, enjoy the act of writing—and if you are published, keep enjoying the act of writing. Don't become self-satisfied, don't stop moving ahead, growing, making it new. The stakes are high. Why else would we write?

We don't write what we know. We write what we wonder about.

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

The only two kinds of books could earn an American writer a living are cookbooks and detective novels.

Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.

If say 90% of Christian marriages were intact, people would be writing about it.

Eloquence is the power to translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak.

Instead of slashing my wrists, I just write a bunch of really crummy songs.

Rewriting is like scrubbing the basement floor with a toothbrush.

My writing isn't actually guided by issues. I know it seems that way, but I don't sit down and think, Oh, there's this issue I'm bothered about. I only write about things that directly impact my life. When I write, there's a pain that I have to reach, and a release I have to work toward for myself. So it's really a question of the particular emotional circumstance that I want to express, a character that appears, a moment in time, and then I write the play backwards.

People say you make your best work when in despair, but I think happiness is a good place to write from.

When I went to Hong Kong, I knew at once I wanted to write a story set there.

What I have to say is all in the music. If I want to say anything, I write a song.

We who write in English are fortunate to have the richest and most versatile language in the world. Respect it.

Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any.

We cannot overlook the importance of wild country as source of inspiration, to which we give expression in writing, in poetry, drawing and painting, in mountaineering, or in just being there.

Writing is one of the few professions in which you can psychoanalyse yourself, get rid of hostilities and frustrations in public, and get paid for it.

I want to get off with the screenwriting.

There's no new direction. It's not more poppy or more rocky. They're just rock'n'roll tunes. I'll never change the music I write.

I'm a believer. I don't go to church. I don't belong to any particular religion, but I do believe in God. I couldn't write what I write about and be creative without a certain form of belief.

Any writer who knows what he's doing isn't doing very much.

You don't write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich. A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery.