Writing Quotes - Page 242

And I felt more like me than I ever had, as if the years I'd lived so far had formed layers of skin and muscle over myself that others saw as me when the real one had been underneath all along, and I knew writing- even writing badly- had peeled away those layers, and I knew then that if I wanted to stay awake and alive, if I wanted to stay me, I would have to keep writing.

I have always known that writing fiction had little effect on the world; that if it did, young men would not have gone to war after The Iliad.

Either a writer doesn't want to talk about his work, or he talks about it more than you want.

My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.

I really started writing music to challenge myself, to see what I could write.

I also thought of playing improvisational jazz and I did take lessons for a while. At first I tried to write fiction by making up things that were completely alien to my life.

I wanted to write stories for myself. At first it was purely an aesthetic thing about craft. I just wanted to become good at the art of something. And writing was very private.

The muse appears at the point in my writing when I sense a subtle shift, a nudge to move over, and everything cracks open, the writing is freed, the lanuage is full, resources are plentiful, ideas pour forth, and to be frank, some of these ideas surprise me. It seems as thought the universe is my friend and is helping me write, its hand over mine.

A person's tragedy does not make up their entire life. A story carves deep grooves into our brains each time we tell it. But we aren't one story. We can change our stories. We can write our own.

My biggest dream from the beginning - besides Evanescence - is scoring film and writing music for film.

There is no such thing as a good writer and a bad liar.

There's an ecstatic side to writing. It's like jazz. It just has a life.

I've found, in my own writing, that a little hatred, keenly directed, is a useful thing.

I've come to recognize songwriting as something that I do, and I want to be good at that. At that craft, if you like. I want to practice it.

When I sit at my table to write, I never know what it's going to be until I'm under way. I trust in inspiration, which sometimes comes and sometimes doesn't. But I don't sit back waiting for it. I work every day.

Unicorns, dragons, witches may be creatures conjured up in dreams, but on the page their needs, joys, anguishes, and redemptions should be just as true as those of Madame Bovary or Martin Chuzzlewit.

In case my life should end with the cannibals, I hope they will write on my tombstone, 'We have eaten Dr. Schweitzer. He was good to the end.'

The mind can proceed only so far upon what it knows and can prove. There comes a point where the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge, but can never prove how it got there. All great discoveries have involved such a leap

Every writer, big or small, needs to say or write that the genius is always hissed at by his contemporaries. Naturally, this is not true, it happens only occasionally and often by chance. But this need within the writer is enlightening.

If you want to be a writer, just write. There's no magic to it.

If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.

An abstract style is always bad. Your sentences should be full of stones, metals, chairs, tables, animals, men, and women.

We didn't say good bye. But we knew it would be the end if we were apart. There was no reason to call or write letters. As it would have been meaningless, if we couldn't hold each other tight.

There was a moment when I changed from an amateur to a professional. I assumed the burden of a profession, which is to write even when you don't want to, don't much like what you're writing, and aren't writing particularly well

I borrowed a guitar at age 16 and taught myself to play because I wanted to write songs.