Writing Quotes - Page 240

The basic drive behind real philosophy is curiosity about the world, not interest in the writings of philosophers.

It's dedicating yourself to your craft. Spending thousands of hours in a studio learning how to write a song, learning how to play different chords, training yourself to sing. You know, to get better and better.

Do people who believe in reincarnation ever say, Darn, I'm still writing the year 1612 on my checks!

As an artist I write about the world I want to live in. And as a musician and someone who is in the public eye, I think you have this responsibility to influence people. So I try influence people to live from their heart and make conscious decisions , and I try just inspire people to make positive change. That's purely the reason I do it. I want to see the world get better, you know?

Whatever you do, make sure you want to write more than you want to be a writer. Make sure you want to act more than you want to be an actor. That is what will sustain you.

One could see that what you are writing was that today's meeting with President Bill Clinton was going to be a disaster. Now, for the first time, I can tell you that you are a disaster.

I'm a musician. I write songs. I just hope when the day is done I've been able to tear a little corner off of the darkness.

What do you really want? Sit down and write it out on a piece of paper, write it in the present tense. You might begin by writing, 'I am so happy and grateful now that...' and then explain how you want your life to be in every area.

You don't write a song to sit there on a page. You write it to sing it.

Critics have said I write without spontaneity, in cold blood. I don't. I write in hot blood.

Songwriting is the cheapest psychiatrist I know.

Paul and I, we never thought that we would make much money out of the thing. We just loved writing software.

Look inside yourself and you'll find a world of things (a world of your own experiences)worth writing about.

Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.

The best reason for putting anything down on paper is that one may then change it.

And yes, there's a simplicity to writing books because you're not a member of a team, so you make all the decisions yourself instead of deferring to a committee.

Reading, like writing, is a creative act. If readers only bring a narrow range of themselves to the book, then they'll only see their narrow range reflected in it.

Writing and performing should deepen the meaning of words, should illuminate, transfix and transform.

I distrust thought. The interior life is highly overrated. I don't like the wispy and the vague... or inductive logic in any kind of writing. I'm impatient with writers who make too much sense. The better things that I've done have come to me by instinct.

A good writer does not write as people write, but as he writes.

Writing lets you step back and think through a problem. Even the angriest rant forces the writer to achieve a degree of thoughtfulness.

I think all of my writing life led up to the writing of 'The Train Driver' because it deals with my own inherited blindness and guilt and all of what being a white South African in South Africa during those apartheid years meant.

More books have resulted from somebody's need to write than from anybody's need to read.

Writing good editorials is chiefly telling the people what they think, not what you think.

The greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances.