Writing Quotes - Page 207

. . . if [writing] lift you from your feet with the great voice of eloquence, then the effect is to be wide, slow, permanent, over the minds of men; . . .

Any expensive ad represents the toil, attention, testing, wit, art, and skill of many people. Far more thought and care go into the composition of any prominent ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the writing of their features and editorials.

The public is the only critic whose judgment is worth anything at all.

If I buy a Fiat Uno, I'll read that, for a man like me, a Ferrari was more suitable. If instead I buy a Ferrari, they'll write that I should have kept my feet on the ground and bought a Fiat. If I smile, I'm not serious. If I don't smile, I'm a rich sulker that doesn't enjoy having the most beautiful job in the world.

When we think we have something to say we are usually wrong. We are fooling ourselves. Trip into discovery. Don't write what you know, discover something new.

Most of us live our lives desperately trying to conceal the anguishing gap between our polished, aspirational, representational selves and our real, human, deeply flawed selves. Dunham lives hers in that gap, welcomes the rest of the world into it with boundless openheartedness, and writes about it with the kind of profound self-awareness and self-compassion that invite us to inhabit our own gaps and maybe even embrace them a little bit more, anguish over them a little bit less.

I find it creatively satisfying to write material and say it out loud in a public place, whether or not anyone's listening.

I don't even know how to Direct Message someone on Instagram. I still write letters.

Characters aren't a fling. They aren't a one-night stand. Getting to know them takes time and hard work. It takes excessive free writes and multiple experiments.

Ah men, why do you want all this attention? I can write poems for myself, make love to a doorknob if absolutely necessary. What do you have to offer me I can't find otherwise except humiliation? Which I no longer need.

Anybody who writes a book is an optimist. First of all, they think they're going to finish it. Second, they think somebody's going to publish it. Third, they think somebody's going to read it. Fourth, they think somebody's going to like it. How optimistic is that?

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.

Writing offers fairly large rewards to a few successful people, but the rewards come late, and most writers are failures.

I usually write songs when I'm in a car by myself and it's usually dangerous because I'm writin' and drivin' at the same time.

Similarly, although we use prepositional phrases when we write, we apparently don't write more effectively when we can label our language in these ways.

Every few weeks she would shut herself up in her room, put on her scribbling suit, and fall into a vortex, as she expressed it, writing away at her novel with all her heart and soul, for till that was finished she could find no peace.

Writers have no real area of expertise. They are merely generalists with a highly inflamed sense of punctuation.

I'm writing a film. With our access to these powerful media, we're going to take over, because it's really disgusting what is put out there now to be consumed.

Since I write the lyrics, I don't want to be pigeonholed into a person who's out there preaching these songs. If you read the lyrics, there isn't a story being set up for you. You have to use your imagination to get the best out of the songs - if you choose to do that.

What you said hurt me very much. I cried all the way to the bank.

There is nothing gutsier to me than a person announcing that their story is one that deserves to be told, especially if that person is a woman. As hard as we have worked and as far as we have come, there are still so many forces conspiring to tell women that our concerns are petty, our opinions aren’t needed, that we lack the gravitas necessary for our stories to matter. That personal writing by women is no more than an exercise in vanity and that we should appreciate this new world for women, sit down, and shut up.

We write about ourselves because we know about ourselves.

I don't write shows with dialogue where actors have to memorize dialogue. I write the scenes where we know everything that's going to happen. There's an outline of about seven or eight pages, and then we improvise it.

And what happened was, it's the same thing an older, more successful writer of ficition might say to a student: write about what you know. And what I knew - of course I knew jazz, but I also knew country, blues and some rock and roll. And that came out.

I confess that there is nothing to teach: no religion, no science, no writings which will lead your mind back to Spirit. Today I speak this way, tomorrow that, but always the Path is beyond words and beyond mind.