Writing Quotes - Page 151

Although I enjoyed writing Film Music it was always a means to an end, in that it enabled me to keep a wife and family and write my classical music, which has always been my passion.

There's always gonna be guys who are just wonderful singers and probably shouldn't be writing songs. Then there's always gonna be guys who move up the ranks writing. I don't know what's healthier or what's the best thing - probably whatever yields the best songs.

I like both music and acting, and they both have a lot in common - timing, immediacy, stuff like that. But acting is more regimented. You wait around for hours, you don't get to write the script, you get hired. Music represents me better. I'm not acting; I'm just expressing myself.

It's impossible to write about Native life without humor-that's how people maintain sanity.

Any historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writing - he will perceive its clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that produces him.

If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

Exclamation points are the most irritating of all. Look! they say, look at what I just said! How amazing is my thought! It is like being forced to watch someone else's small child jumping up and down crazily in the center of the living room shouting to attract attention. If a sentence really has something of importance to say, something quite remarkable, it doesn't need a mark to point it out. And if it is really, after all, a banal sentence needing more zing, the exclamation point simply emphasizes its banality!

I write in order to find out what I truly know and how I really feel about certain things. Writing requires me to go much deeper into my thoughts and memories than conversation does. Writing provides the solitude necessary to reflect on being in this world.

The human bird shall take his first flight, filling the world with amazement, all writings with his fame, and bringing eternal glory to the nest whence he sprang.

When I'm my own editor, there's very little difference between the first draft and the final. I write what feels right to begin with. I rarely make any major changes.

Anyone can write one book: even politicians do it. Starting a second book reveals an intention to be a professional writer.

We know what we are doing by now.We seem to make an album every 18 months or so and I think every band should do that. We're not writing "Sgt. Pepper" every time; we are writing straight ahead rock n' roll.

So long as readers keep reading and my publishers keep publishing, I plan to keep on writing. I'd have to be an idiot to be burnt-out in this job.

One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I'm going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I'll have lost nothing-writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off.

I write my own songs. I made my own videos. I pick my producers. Nothing goes out without my permission. It's all authentic.

You can't have a dream come true if you don't have a dream. You can't write a book if you don't write.

I think, we can only write very personal matters through our experience. When I named my first novel about my son "A Personal Matter," I believe I knew the most important thing: there is not any personal matter; we must find the link between ourselves, our "personal matter," and society.

This is the city that taught me how to write all of these cool songs. Yeah, you guys definitely need a royalty.

Writing is like hunting. There are brutally cold afternoons with nothing in sight, only the wind and your breaking heart. Then the moment when you bag something big. The entire process is beyond intoxicating.

I first started writing fiction in college because I was attracted to beautiful sentences. I loved to read them. I wanted to write them.

I’m asking the questions tonight.” One day I was going to write a book: How to Dictate to a Dictator and Evade an Evader, subtitled How to Handle Jericho Barrons.

The story you are afraid to write is usually the one you are meant to tell.

When you first start writing a song, it's fun, then when you start recording it, it's fun, but by the time you've finished recording it, you're sick of it.

And [now] I think I’ll probably write a lot about birds. My new house has a deck that wraps around my writing room; my writing room has many windows, and outside the windows I’ve hung bird feeders … for enticing different species. So I imagine I will be writing about that.

Because if you're trying to write and you have unlimited time, you can procrastinate an unlimited account, but if you have limited time, you rush to the page trying to get something down in the little bit of fragment of time that you have, and you may write a great deal that way.