Writing Quotes - Page 149

Maybe being oneself is an acquired taste. For a writer it's a big deal to bow--or kneel or get knocked down--to the fact that you are going to write your own books and not somebody else's. Not even those books of the somebody else you thought it was your express business to spruce yourself up to be.

Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.

Writing poetry, we live among the wild beasts, and when we touch a man, the stuff of someone in whom we believed, and he goes to pieces like a rotten pie, you... gather together whatever can be salvaged, while I cup my hands around the live coal of life.

It has been well said that an author who expects results from a first novel is in a position similar to that of a man who drops a rose petal down the Grand Canyon of Arizona and listens for the echo.

Writings survive the years; it is by writings that you know Agamemnon, and those who fought for or against him. [Lat., Scripta ferunt annos; scriptis Agamemnona nosti, Et quisquis contra vel simul arma tulit.]

This letter gives me a tongue; and were I not allowed to write, I should be dumb. [Lat., Praebet mihi littera linguam: Et, si non liceat scribere, mutus ero.]

There should be a law that no ordinary newspaper should be allowed to write about art. The harm they do by their foolish and random writing it would be impossible to overestimate--not to the artist but to the public.... Without them we would judge a man simply by his work; but at present the newspapers are trying hard to induce the public to judge a sculptor, for instance, never by his statues but by the way he treats his wife; a painter by the amount of his income and a poet by the colour of his necktie.

I think everyone should sit down and write a book. It's a lot like therapy but a lot less expensive.

Nobody can tell you you're wrong for writing a song about how you feel - even if you don't really feel that way.

I try to write parts for women that are as complicated and interesting as women actually are.

All those who actually live the mysteries of life haven't the time to write, and all those who have the time don't live them! D'you see?

I’m letting God write my love story because once upon a time, I took control of it and it didn’t work well.

We do not wait for inspiration. We work because we've jolly well got to. But when all is said and done, we toil at this particular job because it's turned out to be our particular job, and in a weird sort of way I suppose we may be said to like it.

I felt a little green, because Shakespeare writes the thought process within the text; it was tricky not to think of what to say and then say it, and instead just deliver the lines.

This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard.

I've always thought of music as something which gives the words their flight and their wings and the music often comes first, although sometimes I'll have a concept, a title idea, a lyric idea that I want to write and the lyric will come first.

When my second husband shouted, 'Me or your writing!' I replied, 'My writing.' We separated.

One can't write without having read - you have to read before beginning to write - and universities offer a very good opportunity to read.

Women have seen that they have locked themselves up with feminist writing.

Ability is nothing without opportunity.

All worthwhile writing... comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.

What you do in the present—by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself—will last into God’s future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable, until the day when we leave it behind altogether. They are part of what we may call building for God’s kingdom.

No person writes to win awards.

I used to forget that I was an Indian woman. I would even forget that I was a woman. I don't think of myself as bringing to the table a lot of 'women's issues.' I don't feel the need to write about maternity. I grew up thinking that the talented people in comedy were hard-joke writers.

When I was a little boy in short pants, I dreamed about a miraculous ointment that would make me invisible. Then I became an adult, began to write, and wanted to be successful. Now I'm successful and would like to have the ointment that would make me invisible.