Writing Quotes - Page 193

If I write something, I fear it will happen, and if I love too much, I fear I will lose that person; nevertheless, I cannot stop writing or loving.

Originality is not seen in single words or even in sentences. Originality is the sum total of a man's thinking or his writing.

You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success - but only if you persist.

Do I start with the lyrics? No. Quite honestly, it's the opposite. I generally get the melody first - I kinda fiddle around on the guitar and work out a melody. The lyrics are there to flesh out the tone of the music. I've tried before to do things the other way around, but it never seems to work. Obviously, I spend a lot of time on my lyrics, I take them very seriously, but they're kinda secondary. Well, equal, maybe. I think sometimes that if you write a poem, it should remain as just a poem, just... words.

A forest," William said, his expression distant. "Where the ground is dry soil and stone. Where tall trees grow and centuries of autumn carpet their roots. Where the wind smells of game and wildflowers." "Why, that was lovely, Lord Bill. Do you ever write poetry? Something for your blueblood lady?" "No." "She doesn't like poetry?" "Leave it." Hehe. "Oh, so you have a lady. How interes--

Writing a novel resembles a journey with only the sketchiest of maps.

There is no story unless you've written it.

If the desire to write is not accompanied by actual writing, then the desire must be not to write.

I have to feel something emotionally on the story to be able to write for it. I turn things down if I don't feel I'm really right to tell that particular story.

The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -henceforth?- the subject to which you are condemned.

It is as easy to dream a book as it is hard to write one.

The best friend a man can have is reading and writing, and the bad ones to avoid are Go and chess and flute and pipe.

Great deeds are usually wrought at great risks.

I'd rather work on my radio show, which no one hears but I put about eight hours of programming and writing into it for those 30 people who do tune in.

I can only write about personal stuff, about my point of view.

If the poet can no longer speak for society, but only for himself, then we are at the last ditch.

What is an artist? He's a man who has antennae, who knows how to hook up to the currents which are in atmosphere, in the cosmos.

The truly great writer does not want to write: he wants the world to be a place in which he can live the life of the imagination. The first quivering word he puts to paper is the word of the wounded angel: pain.

I was a mere tourist with no part whatever in this great conflict; but it was my rare privilege, through an unusual train of circumstances, to witness the moving scenes that I have resolved to describe. In these pages I give only my personal impressions; so my readers should not look here for specific details, nor for information on strategic matters; these things have their place in other writings.

I can still remember the miraculous feeling of writing a sentence, then more sentences, telling a story. The first thing I wrote was a one-page summary of Robinson Crusoe and I am so sorry I do not have it any more; it was at that moment I became an author.

Perhaps because the challenges we face in our country are so daunting, we are also tempted by shortcuts. We tell ourselves that if we invent a new acronym, or write a new empowerment charter, we can avoid some of the back-breaking work that sustained progress requires

Wild, dark times are rumbling toward us, and the prophet who wishes to write a new apocalypse will have to invent entirely new beasts, and beasts so terrible that the ancient animal symbols of St. John will seem like cooing doves and cupids in comparison.

According to my views, aiming at quantitative investigations, that is at establishing relations between measurements of phenomena, should take first place in the experimental practice of physics. By measurement to knowledge [door meten tot weten] I should like to write as a motto above the entrance to every physics laboratory.

There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair.

Failures are inevitable. Unfortunately, in film they live for ever and they're 40 ft wide and 20 ft high.