Writing Quotes - Page 170

The hardest novel to write was Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.

It's a little mad, but I believe I am many people. When I am writing a poem, I feel I am the person who should have written it.

One writes not to be read but to breathe...one writes to think, to pray, to analyze. One writes to clear one's mind, to dissipate one's fears, to face one's doubts, to look at one's mistakes--in order to retrieve them. One writes to capture and crystallize one's joy, but also to disperse one's gloom. Like prayer--you go to it in sorrow more than joy, for help, a road back to 'grace'.

Try to write in a directly emotional way, instead of being too subtle or oblique. Don't be afraid of your material or your past. Be afraid of wasting any more time obsessing about how you look and how people see you. Be afraid of not getting your writing done.

I don't think there is a need of the categorization 'woman writing'. I think in some sense writers lost their gender when they walk into the world of words; I believe that writers ought to be able to slip under the skins of both men and women. Only then will the writing and the characters have credibility and strength.

You never know what you will learn till you start writing. Then you discover truths you never knew existed.

Me personally, I side more with punk rock bands. I grew up with The Misfits, The Dead Boys, The Damned, Dropkick Murphys, and early AFI. That was the stuff that really got me into music. Song writing wise, bands like Alkaline Trio were very important to me for beginning to write songs.

I have a mouse, but don't have a mouse driver for MINIX and have never felt the need to write one. Typing "rm x y z" is a lot faster than clicking five times and then having to convince the system that you really, truly, mean it and this is not a mistake and that you are consenting adult over 18 and that you completely understand the consequences and you still want to do it.

For better or worse, a lot of people's images are based on the first things that are written about them. You can't control what people write about you, so - good or bad - I have never lost sleep about it.

If I can keep losing myself - and finding parts of myself - in other people's writing and direction, then that's all I can really ask for. That's all I want, to keep losing myself.

It's hard to explain how much one can love writing. If people knew how happy it can make you, we would all be writing all the time. It's the greatest secret of the world.

What would there be in a story of happiness? Only what prepares it, only what destroys it can be told.

My goal was to do anything that would lead to a job. I know that writing would not lead to a job. It's too fancy for me. My biggest goal was to be an office receptionist, answer phones. I didn't expect to go beyond that.

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.

You have to live your story before being able to write your story.

Nothing is worth doing at all, nothing is worth writing, which does not do something which will last.

How could poetry and literature have arisen from something as plebian as the cuneiform equivalent of grocery-store bar codes? I prefer the version in which Prometheus brought writing to man from the gods. But then I remind myself that...we should not be too fastidious about where great ideas come from. Ultimately, they all come from a wrinkled organ that at its healthiest has the color and consistency of toothpaste, and in the end only withers and dies.

I can't play bridge. I don't play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn't seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.

Respectable people do not write music or make love as a career.

I don't write songs for myself anymore. I only write songs on assignment. It's purely a business, but it is still so important to me emotionally.

I don't talk very well. With writing, you've time to get it right. Also I've found the more I talk the less I write, and if I didn't write no one would want me to talk anyway.

Freedom of discussion is in England little else than the right to write or say anything which a jury of twelve shopkeepers think it expedient should be said or written.

Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being.

We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can.

A mixtape is for the street, it's something you without necessarily thinking about it, because you have to stay in the game. It's like writing an e-mail saying hello to your friends.