Writing Quotes - Page 244

I took to writing at an early age to escape from meaninglessness, uselessness, unimportance, insignificance, poverty, enslavement, ill health, despair, madness, and all manner of other unattractive, natural and inevitable things.

In a world in which men write thousands of books and one million scientific papers a year, the mythic bricoleur is the man who plays with all that information and hears a music inside the noise.

It wasn't until I was 37 that I grasped the great truth that you've got to write your own books and nobody else's, and then everything followed from there.

I don't have to write about the future. For most people, the present is enough like the future to be pretty scary.

Read, read read. Read everything.

No man can write who is not first a humanitarian

You have to write badly in order to write well.

Writing a first draft is like trying to build a house in a strong wind.

Poets are being pursued by the philosophers today, out of the poverty of philosophy. God damn it, you might think a man had no business to be writing, to be a poet unless some philosophic stinker gave him permission.

To write honestly and with conviction anything about the migration of birds, one should oneself have migrated. Somehow or other we should dehumanize ourselves, feel the feel of feathers on our body and wind in our wings, and finally know what it is to leave abundance and safety and daylight and yield to a compelling instinct, age-old, seeming at the time quite devoid of reason and object.

I tend to not try and listen to a lot of other artists while I'm writing, because if I hear something that's brilliant.

So much of writing is discovery. Sometimes I feel like a rat in a maze, trying to discover the way out. My little heart is beating, and I'm racing down a path thinking, this is the route, it will get me there, as I turn this way and then that.

When a guy writes a scene where a woman does a deviant sex act on camera, it's objectifying. But when a woman writes it, it's feminism.

anyone who writes plays is unbelievably persistent, because there isn't a need in the world for plays. Somehow you internally have to feel a need to write a play.

The literary world is made up of little confederacies, each looking upon its own members as the lights of the universe; and considering all others as mere transient meteors, doomed to soon fall and be forgotten, while its own luminaries are to shine steadily into immortality.

I don't ever know where I'm going. Because one of the wonderful things about writing, which is different than working in programming, you don't need to know. You could just write and discover where you're going. And it's a great deal of fun.

Writing is almost a place of dreams for me, and I don't have to give up anything to do it.

Writing about something specific, in my mind, was overwhelming, so I wrote about art because I love art and I know I can say a couple of funny things about art.

A story isn't about a moment in time, a story is about the moment in time.

We write to make sense of it all.

A good title should be like a good metaphor. It should intrigue without being too baffling or too obvious.

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.

There is a sort of man who pays no attention to his good actions, but is tormented by his bad ones. This is the type that most often writes about himself.

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.