Writing Quotes - Page 179

I keep recycling and repackaging music that I've done in the past, as though I can't write anymore. Like, okay, I'm done with that. But I need to kind of prod myself again into come on, Herbie, get off your duff and start writing some new music.

Solitude is very different from a 'time-out' from our busy lives. Solitude is the very ground from which community grows. Whenever we pray alone, study, read, write, or simply spend quiet time away from the places where we interact with each other directly, we are potentially opened for a deeper intimacy with each other.

Other-Love is writing's first name.

If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden.

Having decided to follow my own intuitive path I began to write music on the basis of harmonized spoken words, for new instruments and in new scales.

Watching first nights, though I've seen quite a few by now, is never any better. It's a nerve-racking experience. It's not a question of whether the play goes well or badly. It's not the audience reaction, it's my reaction. I'm rather hostile toward audiences—I don't much care for large bodies of people collected together. Everyone knows that audiences vary enormously; it's a mistake to care too much about them. The thing one should be concerned with is whether the performance has expressed what one set out to express in writing the play. It sometimes does.

Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.

The actual writing time is a lot shorter than the thinking time.

If you want to do anything, you got to go do it. Perform a lot, write a lot, make yourself better. Use the Internet, make videos, create content.

Writing for me, even what you call serious writing, is play.

I write for the still, small possibility of justice.

I love jazz. I still do. Dave Brubeck and Stan Getz are so good. I took a notification course in Jazz Orchestration. It wasn't a grandiose as you'd think but I did have to to go to Los Angeles to do it and get an understanding of the keyboard because the keyboard became my tool and I used it a lot in transposing and composing. All the flats and time values. I spent a year doing that because in those days you had to be able to write your own music and read sheets.

Write. Don't talk about writing. Don't tell me about your wonderful story ideas. Don't give me a bunch of "somedays." Plant your ass and scribble, type, keyboard. If you have any talent at all, it will leak out despite your failure to pay attention in English.

You get caught up in a cycle at some point, so I broke the cycle and decided; I'm going to really write a lot of books, because I need to get in touch with that part of myself in order to make more music.

And not only did this great consolidated ecclesiasticism assume to lord it over men's earthly treasures, but they lorded it over men's minds, prescribing what men should think and read and write.

For it is a plain fact that, most certainly in the West, the writings, works of art, musical compositions which are of central reference, comport that which is "grave and constant" (Joyce's epithets) in the mystery of our condition.

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own unorthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

An editor should have a pimp for a brother so he'd have someone to look up to.

Whats fascinating is that when you write a script, its almost a stream of consciousness. You have an idea that it means something, but youre not always sure what. Then when you get on the set, the actors teach you.

Unfortunately many young writers are more concerned with fame than with their own work... It's much more important to write than to be written about.

I wish thee as much pleasure in the reading, as I had in the writing.

My dream writing room would be the Imperial Library in Vienna.

In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of them seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do not recognize myself in them. There was a person who wrote them, and it was I. I experienced them, but it was in another life, from which I just woke up, as if from someone else's dream.

Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.