Writing Quotes - Page 16

For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible.

In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas, a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed.

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.

In the book of life every page has two sides: we human beings fill the upper side with our plans, hopes and wishes, but providence writes on the other side, and what it ordains is seldom our goal.

We must begin to make what I call "conscious choices," and to really recognize that we are the same. It's from that place in my heart that I write my songs.

Rage is ... This is Breslin's full quote: Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers

But gentlemen, as long as I am an American Citizen, and as long as American blood runs in these veins, I shall hold myself at liberty to speak, to write, and to publish whatever I please on any subject.

John Wells let me write a couple of West Wings, which was an incredible gift. I loved it once I got past the brain injury part of it, and so I'm working on a couple of things that are far from fruition, but what I want to pursue

We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!

The way to start writing isn't by writing at all. But by living. It isn't about creating something from thin air, but about documenting our personal feelings about the things that we see. Or to put it crudely, how are you going to be a storyteller if you have no story to tell? Perhaps, in the end, there are no such things as creative people; they are only sharp observers with sensitive hearts.

The best part of writing is not the communication of knowledge to other people, but the acquisition and synthesizing of knowledge for oneself.

No one is able to enjoy such feast than the one who throws a party in his own mind.

I'd written a lot of songs with hummingbirds in them. None of them ever came to anything, but I did write a few lines last month. It went like this: 'Listen to the hummingbird whose wings you cannot see. Listen to the hummingbird, don't listen to me'.

In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you'll dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it to the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused.

Writing songs is cheaper than going to therapy.

Imagine you had a bank that each morning credited your account with $1,440 - with one condition: whatever part of the $1,440 you failed to use during the day would be erased from your account, and no balance would be carried over. What would you do? You'd draw out every cent every day and use it to your best advantage. Well, you do have such a bank, and its name is time. Every morning, this bank credits you with 1,440 minutes. And it writes off as forever lost whatever portion you have failed to invest to good purpose.

How happy is the lot of the mathematician! He is judged solely by his peers, and the standard is so high that no colleague or rival can ever win a reputation he does not deserve. No cashier writes a letter to the press complaining about the incomprehensibility of Modern Mathematics and comparing it unfavorably with the good old days when mathematicians were content to paper irregularly shaped rooms and fill bathtubs without closing the waste pipe.

Do not let kindness and truth leave you; Bind them around your neck, Write them on the tablet of your heart.

I'm not the kind of guy who sits around at home and writes songs. Once in a while I'll pick up a guitar and noodle around, but it's rare.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

Great heroes need great sorrows and burdens, or half their greatness goes unnoticed. It is all part of the fairy tale.

Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what.

Life's like a movie, write your own ending. Keep believing, keep pretending. We've done just what we set out to do. Thanks to the lovers, the dreamers and you.

A story to me means a plot where there is some surprise... Because this is how life is full of surprises.

I said, other people can write songs, let's see if I can. So the first 400 or 500 wound up on the floor somewhere. Then I wrote one called Melissa.