Writing Quotes - Page 20

The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.

I saw that bad handwriting should be regarded as a sign of an imperfect education.

Half my life is an act of revision.

I would love to see more women directors because they represent half of the population and gave birth to the whole world. Without them the rest [of the world] are not getting to know the whole story.

What was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there.

Being a poet is one of the unhealthier jobs--no regular hours, so many temptations!

We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

Writing a novel is not method acting and I find it easy to step out of it at cocktail hour.

Freedom begins the moment you realize someone else has been writing your story and it's time you took the pen from his hand and started writing it yourself.

Todd Glass has amazing energy on stage. Dave Attell is one of my favorites because he's a one liner comic who is always incredibly in the moment with the audience. As for newer people, I think Adrienne Iapalucci writes some great, dark jokes and Sean Patton has a hilarious voice on stage.

It is to be remembered that all art is magical in origin - music, sculpture, writing, painting - and by magical I mean intended to produce very definite results. Paintings were originally formulae to make what is painted happen. Art is not an end in itself, any more than Einstein's matter-into-energy formulae is an end in itself. Like all formulae, art was originally FUNCTIONAL, intended to make things happen, the way an atom bomb happens from Einstein's formulae.

Architecture is a discipline that takes time and patience. If one spends enough years writing complex novels one might be able, someday, to construct a respectable haiku.

Got a long list of ex-lovers, they'll tell you I'm insane. But I got a blank space baby, and I'll write your name.

In recent years it has been suggested that the Second Amendment protects the "collective" right of states to maintain militias, while it does not protect the right of "the people" to keep and bear arms... If anyone entertained this notion in the period during which the Constitution and Bill of Rights were debated and ratified, it remains one of the most closely guarded secrets of the 18th century, for no known writing surviving from the period between 1787 and 1791 states such a thesis.

If prisons, freight trains, swamps, and gators don't get ya to write songs, man, y'ain't got no business writin' songs.

The challenge of screenwriting is to say much in little and then take half of that little out and still preserve an effect of leisure and natural movement

Set your fantasies in the here and now and then, if challenged, claim to be writing Magical Realism.

My writing knows more than I know. What a writer must do is listen to her book. It might take you where you don’t expect to go. That’s what happens when you write stories. You listen and you say ‘a ha,’ and you write it down. A lot of it is not planned, not conscious; it happens while you’re doing it. You know more about it after you’re done.

Poetic justice, poetic justice.. if I told you that a flower bloom in a dark room would you trust it. I mean I write poems in these songs.

For me, the writing life doesn't just happen when I sit at the writing desk. It is a life lived with a centering principle, and mine is this: that I will pay close attention to this world I find myself in. 'My heart keeps open house,' was the way the poet Theodore Roethke put it in a poem. And rendering in language what one sees through the opened windows and doors of that house is a way of bearing witness to the mystery of what it is to be alive in this world.

Ira Gershwin, shame on him. I mean, some of the writing.

It's like a novelist writing far out things. If it makes a point and makes sense, then people like to read that. But if it's off in left field and goes over the edge, you lose it. The same with musical talent, I think.

I am writing with my burnt hand about the nature of fire.

A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure.

A lot of songs you write are just for exercise - just pencil sharpeners.