Writing Quotes - Page 139

Carrying a small notebook with you always, in your pocket or purse, along with a reliable ballpoint pen will enable you to jot down spot observations and quick character sketches before the first sharp impressions fade away. You'll need all kinds of story actors, because even picture books can include a wide range of ages, relationships, occupations, and nationalities. Learn to observe and analyze swiftly, wherever you are.

The best kind of writing, and the biggest thrill in writing, is to suddenly read a line from your typewriter that you didnt know was in you.

Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.

Every sentence must do one of two things-reveal character or advance the action.

I stayed away from drugs, I never smoked a pipe. When I wanna get high, I smoke the mic. I never did white lines, I only write lines, and I ain't sniffin' nothing but the vapors from hype rhymes.

. . . All artists’ work is autobiographical. Any writer’s work is a map of their psyche. You can really see what their concerns are, what their obsessions are, and what interests them.

Storytelling is my currency. It's my only worth. The only thing of value I have in this life is my ability to tell a story, whether in print, orating, writing it down or having people acting it out.

I think the major good idea in Unix was its clean and simple interface: open, close, read, and write.

Actors, who invest a lot of time and energy, will never put down each other. Every one of us has their own space in the industry. These stories are either publicity mechanisms or someone just writes them to create a controversy.

I use a computer, but before I begin each new book I keep a notebook. I write down everything that comes to mind during that period before I actually begin. It might take months or weeks. That notebook is my security blanket so that I never have to face a blank screen (or blank page). But I print out often and my best ideas usually come with a pencil in my hand.

Make notes—I’ve lost more material than I’ve ever written. Contrary to popular opinion, it’s not still up there in one’s brain. It’s in outer space and it ain’t coming back.

In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn't know how to write essays.

The psychology degree is simply that I was a chemistry major, and they kept wanting the correct answer, whereas in psychology you basically write whatever you want, and chances are you get a B.

I had a song called "Folsom Prison Blues" that was a hit just before "I Walk The Line." And the people in Texas heard about it at the state prison and got to writing me letters asking me to come down there. So I responded and then the warden called me and asked if I would come down and do a show for the prisoners in Texas.

In a country this large and a language even larger ... there ought to be a living for somebody who cares and wants to entertain and instruct a reader.

A lot of my writing is basically about observation, and things that I've seen, either through personal experiences or the experiences of people around me, or society at large.

I guess there are never enough books.

The building of the architecture of a novel - the craft of it - is something I never tire of.

People will tell you that writing is too difficult, that it's impossible to get your work published, that you might as well hang yourself. Meanwhile, they'll keep writing and you'll have hanged yourself.

The only excuse for a novelist, aside from the entertainment and vicarious living his books give the people who read them, is as a sort of second-class historian of the age he lives in. The "reality" he missed by writing about imaginary people, he gains by being able to build a reality more nearly out of his own factual experience than a plain historian or biographer can.

If a man means his writing seriously, he must mean to write well. But how can he write well until he learns to see what he has written badly. His progress toward good writing and his recognition of bad writing are bound to unfold at something like the same rate.

What I am going to write is the last of what I have to say. I will say that literature is the only consciousness we possess and that its role as consciousness must inform us of our ability to comprehend the hideous danger of nuclear power.

To disguise nothing, to conceal nothing, to write about those things that are closest to our pain, our happiness; to write about our sexual clumsiness, the agonies of Tantalus, the depth of our discouragement-what we glimpse in our dreams-our despair. To write about the foolish agonies of anxiety, the refreshment of our strength when these are ended; to write about our painful search for self, jeopardized by a stranger in the post office, a half-seen face in a train window, to write about the continents and populations of our dreams, about love and death, good and evil, the end of the world.

In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.