Writing Quotes - Page 201

I like writing a lot more than I used to. I used to find it scary but now I've got used to it once it gets going. I used to find it hard to start. Fear of the blank page. The first thing you write down won't bear any relation to what's in your head and that's always disappointing.

He who speaks, he who writes is above all one who speaks on behalf of all those who have no voice.

The story is not in the plot but in the telling.

Writing doesn't mean necessarily putting words on a sheet of paper. You can write a chapter while walking or eating.

Joy is a part of my process. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that poetry, as a practice, necessitates a sense of joy. It's exhilarating to come into contact with the things we write into being. And a real sense of play and abandon – even when we are relying on hard-won technique, and even when the aim is deadly serious. How often do we get the excuse to stop, think, and then stop thinking altogether and try to listen to what sits behind our outside of our thoughts? Poets are lucky.

Songwriting is a very mysterious process. It feels like creating something from nothing. It's something I don't feel like I really control.

Songwriting never gets old. There's always stuff to write about.

You don't write a book to show off.

I always start out with an idea, even a boring idea, that becomes a question I don't have answers to.

The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about—clouds—daffodils—waterfalls—what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in—these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks.

There's always a part of my brain saying: 'Stop getting comfortable. Don't relax.' Because I find it difficult to write when I'm happy. I have to go out there and get battered up and bruised to write anything. I have to feel something.

I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.

Hemingway was very sparse in his writing. Kris Kristofferson is like that. He can take four words and say it all.

Short, sweet, and to the point. Clear writing, and therefore clear commands, comes from clear thinking. Think simple.

One of the problems with writing a cookbook is that recipes exist in the moment.

Take care that you never spell a word wrong. Always before you write a word, consider how it is spelled, and, if you do not remember, turn to a dictionary. It produces great praise to a lady to spell well. to his daughter Martha

I do no writing while I'm in Belgrade visiting my grandma.

Writing 'We Are Never Getting Back Together' was one of the most hilarious experiences I have ever had in the studio because it just happened so naturally.

The professorial dictum has always been to write what you know, but I say write what you don't know and find something out. And it works.

And they write innumerable books; being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation, and dodging his emptiness.

... stop trying to get me to write about 'decent courageous people' -- read the Ladies' Home Journal for those! ... I believe in going through and facing the worst, not hiding from it.

I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.

Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To leap. To fly. To fail.

There's a marvelous sense of mastery that comes with writing a sentence that sounds exactly as you want it to.

There's a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don't, and the secret is this: It's not the writing part that's hard. What's hard is sitting down to write. What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance.