Writing Quotes - Page 168

If you are destined to become a writer, you can't help it. If you can help it, you aren't destined to become a writer. The frustrations and disappointments, not even to mention the unspeakable loneliness, are too unbearable for anyone who doesn't have a deep sense of being unable to avoid writing.

Writing is a concentrated form of thinking...a young writer sees that with words he can place himself more clearly into the world. Words on a page, that's all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions.

I just love life. I love people. I love to write, that's my gift. I love to sing. I have a good attitude. I like to think I shine from the inside.

As much as I like it when a book I'm writing speeds along, the downside can be that an author becomes too eager to finish and rushes the end. The end is even more important than the first page, and rushing can damage it.

I write not to record what I think but to discover what I think

The first time I went to Wales I thought I'd landed in a land of hobbits. Everybody was really small and the houses were small and the writing was backwards.

Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likable.

Good writing isn’t a science. It’s an art, and the horizon is infinite. You can always get better.

You write down a paragraph or two describing several different subjects creating a kind of story ingredients-list, I suppose, and then cut the sentences into four or five-word sections; mix em up and reconnect them. You can get some pretty interesting idea combinations like this. You can use them as is or, if you have a craven need to not lose control, bounce off these ideas and write whole new sections.

I always loved writing songs - writing for myself and demo-ing songs, really with no intention of ever letting anyone else hear them. Finally the Foo Fighters stuff happened when I just went to the studio down the street from my house and recorded some stuff in about five or six days, and all these people wanted to release it as an album. I wanted to release it on my own, with no photos and no names on it.

The voice in my head has a stutter, and that's really annoying. D-D-D-Dave Dave. What? K-K-K-Kill your p-p-p-parents. L-L-L-Loa... Write it down!

Great writers arrive among us like new diseases - threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

And every place and time an author writes about is imaginary, from Oz to Raymond Chandler's L.A. to Dickens's London.

It is far easier to write an angry letter than to go and say angry things to another person - because as soon as we look in one another's faces we can see the other point of view.

"Best in the world," "lowest price in existence, " etc are at best claiming the expected. But superlative of that sort are usually damaging. They suggestion looseness of expression, a tendency to exaggerate, a careless truth. They lead readers to discount all the statements that you make

I think I just want to leave my mark in some way. I hope I leave the world a better place than it was when I came, and I think the best way I can do that is through acting and writing, and hopefully it will make a difference someday.

There is dust enough on some of your Bibles to write 'damnation' with your fingers.

There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.

What a woman says to an eager lover, write it on running water, write it on air.

Writing is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living.

The ending has to fit. The ending has to matter, and make sense. I could care less about whether it's happy or sad or atomic. The ending is the place where you go, “Aha. Of course. That's right.”

The way I write is generally about love. I have a great fascination about the subject.

Reading, writing, teaching, learning, are all activities aimed at introducing civilizations to each other.

I found a certain kind of music congenial to me; it never occurred to me to write music that was academically acceptable.

Novel writing is far and away the most exhausting work I know.