Writing Quotes - Page 192

Songwriting is ... all about intuition - this thing pops into your head for a reason and it's up to you to follow it. It's like there's a spirit, or intuitive network, that comes through all of us, but most people don't take the time to think about it or remember it. These little things pop into our heads - it's just a process of intuition. The initial thought comes in a baby state, and you work on that some more.

I can write anywhere.

History is the art of making an argument about the past by telling a story accountable to evidence. In the writing of history, a story without an argument fades into antiquarianism; an argument without a story risks pedantry. Writing history requires empathy, inquiry, and debate. It requires forswearing condescension, cant, and nostalgia. The past isn’t quaint. Much of it, in fact, is bleak.

I never killed anyone. I avoid going over that edge by writing about a guy who has taken a flying leap over it.

I actually have a young readers' series that I wanna do, kind of in the same lane as a Harry Potter or Narnia or Twilight. I want to write stuff like that.

In '98, I locked myself in my house, went out of my mind and wrote 25 songs. I rarely bathed during that period of writing; I sent out for food, I didn't really venture out of my house in three or four months. It was a hell of an experience. The album is an overview of birth to now.

I'm not a dictator who writes things to tell people what to do.

Since I stopped writing, I read more than ever. Other people's words, not my own - my words are gone.

I haven’t had trouble with writer’s block. I think it’s because my process involves writing very badly. My first drafts are filled with lurching, clichéd writing, outright flailing around. Writing that doesn’t have a good voice or any voice. But then there will be good moments. It seems writer’s block is often a dislike of writing badly and waiting for writing better to happen.

What I regretted in La Nausee was not to have put myself completely into the thing. I remained outside my hero's disease, protected by my neurosis which, through writing, gave me happiness.

Recollection is the only paradise from which we cannot be turned out.

I would run into the corner store, the bodega, and just grab a paper bag or buy juice - anything just to get a paper bag. And I'd write the words on the paper bag and stuff these ideas in my pocket until I got back. Then I would transfer them into the notebook.

Did you hear that we're writing Iraq's new Constitution? Why not just give them ours? We're not using it anymore.

My ear is not working, my poetry ear. I can't write a line that doesn't sound like pots and pans falling out of the cupboard.

Editing should be, especially in the case of old writers, a counselling rather than a collaborating task. The tendency of the writer-editor to collaborate is natural, but he should say to himself, 'How can I help this writer to say it better in his own style?' and avoid 'How can I show him how I would write it, if it were my piece?'

Every hour you spend writing is an hour you don't spend worrying about your writing.

My idea of writing is of unflinching and continual effort, somehow trying to find the right words until you reach a point where you can make no further progress and you either have something or you don’t.

The greatest rules of dramatic writing are conflict, conflict, conflict.

Nothing new that is really interesting comes without collaboration

A professional writer is a joke. You write because you can't do anything else, and then you have another job.

Loneliness is necessary for pure poetry. When someone intrudes into the poet's life (and any sudden personal contact, whether in the bed or in the heart, is an intrusion) the poet loses his or her balance for a moment, slips into being what he or she is, uses his or her poetry as one would use money or sympathy. The person who writes the poetry emerges, tentatively, like a hermit crab from a conch shell. The poet, for that instant, ceases to be a dead person.

Just because you're perfectionist doesn't mean you're perfect.

I spent my entire youth writing slowly with revisions and endless rehashing speculation and deleting and got so I was writing one sentence a day and the sentence had no FEELING. Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings.

Writing for me is a kind of compulsion, so I don't think anyone could have made me do it, or prevented me from doing it.

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.