Writing Quotes - Page 209

You must write for the waste basket.

Once in seven years I burn all my sermons; for it is a shame, if I cannot write better sermons now than I did seven years ago.

The craft or art of writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for the wordlessness.

The best way to write a song is to think of something else and then the song kind of creeps in. The beginning makes no sense whatsoever. It just, like, rhymes. And then all of a sudden I'll go into, I am an old woman named after my mother.

When I'm writing a novel, I'm dealing with a double life. I live in the present at the same time that I live in the past with my characters. It is this that makes a novelist so eccentric and unpleasant.

I also had Elliot Gould and Martin Short and Nasim Pedrad - let alone Zack Pearlman who is going to be a huge star, as is Seaton Smith - out there and I love writing for them and just sitting back and watching them be excellent. And when you are sitting across from Elliott Gould sharing a scene it just raises your game.

I'm trying to write for people my age. And my inspiration over the years has changed dramatically.

Music actually meant something when I started doing it. Too bad I wasn't mature enough to write anything that meant anything.

Economists must leave to Adam Smith alone the glory of the Quarto, must pluck the day, fling pamphlets into the wind, write always sub specie temporis , and achieve immortality by accident, if at all.

Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.

The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.

All human discoveries seem to be made only for the purpose of confirming more strongly the truths come from on high, and contained in the sacred writings.

Still, something about writing made me spend large hours of my free time at my desk.

The surprising thing about this paper is that a man who could write it would.

I didn't want to be like Yeats; I wanted to be Yeats.

I always thought that writing poetry was in itself a political act.

Once upon a time a Georgian printed a couple of books that attracted notice, but immediately it turned out that he was little more than an amanuensis for the local blacks--that his works were really the products, not of white Georgia, but of black Georgia. Writing afterward as a white man, he swiftly subsided into the fifth rank.

People no longer write letters. Lacking the leisure, and, for the most part, the ability, they dictate dispatches, and scribble messages. When you are in the humor, you should take a peep at some of the letters written by people who lived long ago.

I'm making records, my fans they can't wait. They write me letters, tell me I'm great.

Yes, letter writing is antiquated - though there remain a few renegades who still so treasure the luxury of contemplating their lives in letters that they would rather write than call.

I don't know what I think until I write it down.

I want to keep going as I have, to travel, read, perform, write, and enjoy my family. I've promised myself only this: no more Laundromats, no more two-shows-a-night, and no more deadlines. I'll work at my own pace.

Your hands learn to do things that you could spend a whole day trying to write about and articulate. There's a discomfort associated with trying to put all those different ways the brain works together. I kind of like to avail myself of that discomfort.

I spent a fair amount of time editing the lyrics and allowing the song to kind of evolve. ... anytime there's anything worthwhile, it certainly 'feels' like it happened on the spur of the moment, but it's a composite of lots of spurs of the moment, hopefully. And over time, you catch up with those, and then you have a full set of lyrics you've thought of and you feel comfortable singing.

It's not easy to writing thank-you notes for the stuff you didn't want in the first place.