Writing Quotes - Page 19

I'd like to write some songs that are so good that nobody understands them. Not even myself.

Sending a handwritten letter is becoming such an anomaly. It's disappearing. My mom is the only one who still writes me letters. And there's something visceral about opening a letter - I see her on the page. I see her in her handwriting.

The whites, who are educated and civilized, swindle me, and I am not hard to swindle because I do not know how to read and write.

I don't see how you can write anything of value if you don't offend someone.

Writing, for me, means humility. It’s a process that involves fear and doubt, especially if you’re writing honestly.

Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read.

Talking of Pleasure, this moment I was writing with one hand, and with the other holding to my Mouth a Nectarine - how good how fine. It went down all pulpy, slushy, oozy, all its delicious embonpoint melted down my throat like a large, beatified Strawberry.

Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too. If she doesn’t show up invited, eventually she just shows up

Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.

Your emotional life is not written in cement during childhood. You write each chapter as you go along.

Ancient art has a specific inner content. At one time, art possessed the same purpose that books do in our day, namely: to preserve and transmit knowledge. In olden days, people did not write books, they incorporated their knowledge into works of art. We would find a great many ideas in the works of ancient art passed down to us, if only we knew how to read them.

Awards are like hemorrhoids. Sooner or later every asshole gets one.

We write from life and call it literature, and literature lives because we are in it.

All that is necessary to break the spell of inertia and frustration is this: Act as if it were impossible to fail. That is the talisman, the formula, the command of right-about-face which turns us from failure towards success.

I've always written songs that were confessional, acoustic, wordy - my writing style matches my personality. The music always has to match the mouth it comes out of.

I write and sing about whatever I am able to understand and feel. I feel that it is healthier to look out at the world through a window than through a mirror. Otherwise, all you see is yourself and whatever is behind you.

Today we can say that at last the director writes the film. The image--its plastic composition and the way it is set in time, because it is founded on a much higher degree of realism--has at its disposal more means of manipulating reality and of modifying it from within. The film-maker is no longer the competitor of the painter and the playwright, he is, at last the equal of the novelist

A life spent writing has taught me to be wary of words. Those that seem clearest are often the most treacherous.

Sit down to write what you have thought, and not to think what you shall write.

It is impossible to discourage the real writers - they don't give a damn what you say, they're going to write.

The thing is, unfortunately, I write the best songs when I'm miserable.

I am a woman, and I am a Latina. Those are the things that make my writing distinctive. Those are the things that give my writing power.

The world is your exercise book, the pages on which you do your sums. It is not reality, though you may express reality there if you wish. You are also free to write lies, or nonsense, or to tear the pages.

The writer is an explorer. Every step is an advance into a new land.

Muddy language is not confined to policies alone. Each of you has seen replies to simple questions in which the meaning was lost through hopelessly obscure wording. When a person writes to the Veterans Administration, he is entitled to an easily understood, frank, and courteous reply. If our replies cannot be understood, they are not only not worth writing, but they simply create additional work.