Writing Quotes - Page 165

The beginnings and endings of all human undertakings are untidy, the building of a house, the writing of a novel, the demolition of a bridge, and, eminently, the finish of a voyage.

I research, write, travel and teach. I rarely arrange for spare time. If we do not fill our days with high priority actions they will fill with low priority actions. I would prefer to live my life according to my highest priorities and do what I love, which again is research, write, travel and teach. It is my mission and calling. It is what inspires me. It is my destiny.

Those rituals of getting ready to write produce a kind of trance state.

Just start the sentence...and see what happens. This is how we write.

There is something magical about putting a problem in writing. It is almost as though by writing about what is wrong, you start to discover new ways of making it right.

I hear what many of you are saying: We don’t have the time, we are busy. Well Nobody Has Time, Everyone Is Busy. In the time it took you to read this post, your life just got a minute shorter. That is precisely why we read (and why some of us write): because life is short and finite, we want more, and literature is the distillation of all those lives we will not lead.

Writers write. Dreamers talk about it.

I've always loved brainstorming with other writers, and I consider having my work critiqued a part of that brainstorming.

Writing songs is no different than explaining to somebody what you dreamed last night: No one ever gives you crap for what you dreamed last night. "I was laying in my bed, and all of a sudden a stallion jumped on my bed and the next thing I know I was in Mars but it looked like my kitchen"... That's kind of what I do with my songs, write them in a dream-like manner. It's up to people to swallow it however they want.

A solitary American monk named Thomas Berry writes that in our relationship to nature, we have been autistic for centuries. Wrapped tightly in our own version of knowledge, we have been unreceptive to the wisdom of the natural world. To tune in again, to have the "spontaneous environmental rapport" that characterized our ancestors, will take doing something that is perfectly delightful: reimmersing ourselves in the natural world.

Ideas are the cheapest part of the writing. They are free. The hard part is what you do with ideas you've gathered.

All writers write about themselves, just as the old storytellers chose to tell stories that spoke to and about themselves. They call it the world, but it is themselves they portray. The world of which they write is like a mirror that reflects the inside of their hearts, often more truly than they know.

The emotional findings, then, suggest that to gain the most benefit from writing about life’s traumas, acknowledge the negative but celebrate the positive.

Remember technology does not make good work. You can still write a poem on a brown paper bag, and haiku is just as profound as the pyramids.

To be a musician, especially a singer-songwriter - well, you don't do that if you have a thriving social life. You do it because there's an element of alienation in your life.

I write of the wish that comes true--for some reason, a terrifying thought.

A whole army, though they can neither write nor read, are not afraid of a platform... therefore a whole army is afraid of one man.

I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.

Early on, if I was alone two three nights in a row, I'd start writing poems about suicide.

Something that you feel will find its own form.

Your job as an executive is to edit, not write. It's OK to write once in a while but if you do it often there's a fundamental problem with the team. Every time you do something ask if you're writing or editing and get in the mode of editing.

As trait after trait swings into focus and fulfillment, can we write any other name under Isaiah's amazing portrait of the sublime Sufferer in Chapter 53 than Jesus of Nazareth?

Grand. There's a word I really hate. It's a phony. I could puke every time I hear it.

As regards plot I find real life no help at all. Real life seems to have no plots. And as I think a plot desirable and almost necessary, I have this extra grudge against life.

Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.