Writing Quotes - Page 187

To be able to write a play a man must be sensitive, imaginative, naive, gullible, passionate; he must be something of an imbecile, something of a poet, something of a liar, something of a damn fool.

I never think of my audience when I write a poem. I try to write out of whatever is haunting me; in order for a poem to feel authentic, I have to feel I'm treading on very dangerous ground, which can mean that the resulting revelations may prove hurtful to other people. The time for thinking about that kind of guilt or any collective sense of responsibility, however, occurs much later in the creative process, after the poem is finished.

Writing is like a sport - you only get better if you practice

I tell aspiring writers that you have to find what you must write. When you find it, you will know, because the subject matter won’t let you go. It’s not enough to write simply because you think it would be neat to be published. You have to be compelled to write. If you’re not, nothing else that you do matters.

GNU, which stands for Gnu's Not Unix, is the name for the complete Unix-compatible software system which I am writing so that I can give it away free to everyone who can use it.

Easy writing's curst hard reading.

Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder.

I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it's good for the circulation.

Anyone can express himself or herself, but what writers and poets want to do in their work, more than simply express themselves, is communicate.

My stories run up and bite me on the leg - I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

This afternoon, burn down the house. Tomorrow, pour critical water upon the simmering coals. Time enough to think and cut and rewrite tomorrow. But today-explode-f ly-apart-disint egrate! The other six or seven drafts are going to be pure torture. So why not enjoy the first draft, in the hope that your joy will seek and find others in the world who, by reading your story, will catch fire, too?

Through lack of education, we're not teaching kids to read and write. So there is the danger that you raise up a generation of morons.

Plasma on the wall/Write my name on your heart like I'm Lucille Ball/But love changes, a thug changes/And best friends become strangers

The Gods we worship write their names on our faces; be sure of that. And a man will worship something ... That which dominates will determine his life and character. Therefore it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.

On the other side, the conservative party, composed of the most moderate, able, and cultivated part of the population, is timid, and merely defensive of property. It vindicates no right, it aspires to no real good, it brands no crime, it proposes no generous policy, it does not build, nor write, nor cherish the arts, nor foster religion, nor establish schools, nor encourage science, nor emancipate the slave, nor befriend the poor, or the Indian, or the immigrant.

It's misleading to think of writers as special creatures, word sorcerers who possess some sort of magical knowledge hidden from everyone else. Writers are ordinary people who like to write. They feel the urge to write, and they scratch that itch every chance they get.

I want people to notice my writing abilities are real and that I'm not just stuck in one situation.

Prune what is turgid, elevate what is commonplace, arrange what is disorderly, introduce rhythm where the language is harsh, modify where it is too absolute.

I got a scholarship to Seattle University and I was writing arrangements for singers and everybody. But the music course was too dry and I really wanted to get away from home.

I have a writing addiction.

Every serious man in dealing with really serious subjects carefully avoids writing. ... There does not exist, nor will there ever exist, any writing of mine dealing with this subject.

People have told me that everything about me, every facet of my life, psyche, experiences, dreams, and fears, are laid out explicitly in my writing, that from the corpus of my work I can be absolutely and precisely inferred. This is true.

Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes.

When you are writing a spoken word poem, the tools you're working with are your voice, your body, how it's going to sound to someone when you're saying it out loud. Which is different from when you're writing it on the page. That toolbox becomes how does this look visually on the page, how does this read among pages, how is this in relation to poems that are before it or after it. I don't think one is better or more successful than the other. You've just gotta think about "what are the tools I'm using, and how are they most effective in this form?"

The question for writing then is this: how long are you willing to be unheard?