Writing Quotes - Page 245

The ideal audience the poet imagines consists of the beautiful who go to bed with him, the powerful who invite him to dinner and tell him secrets of state, and his fellow-poets. The actual audience he gets consists of myopic schoolteachers, pimply young men who eat in cafeterias, and his fellow-poets. This means, in fact, he writes for his fellow-poets.

The only reward to be expected from literature is contempt if one fails and hatred if one succeeds.

Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.

A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.

When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.

Every composer's music reflects in its subject-matter and in its style the source of the money the composer is living on while writing the music.

'Divergent' was my utopian world. I mean, that wasn't the plan. I never even set out to write dystopian fiction, that's just what I had when I was finished. At the beginning, I was just writing about a place I found interesting and a character with a compelling story, and as I began to build the world, I realized that it was my utopia.

It's exciting to watch people do and write and say what they feel like doing, writing and saying.

Writing makes no noise, except groans, and it can be done everywhere, and it is done alone.

Sure, it's simple, writing for kids... Just as simple as bringing them up.

If you want your writing to be taken seriously, don't marry and have kids, and above all, don't die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that.

If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.

You sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned to do it.

For a writer, they say write what you know. As a performer, you find it in yourself, in your heart. You relate to the character. You try to live it, try to have it be real for you.

Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.

I love, love, love songwriting. It's like the most therapeutic thing in the world.

Professor Irwin Corey had some of the best timing in the world, and that is something you can't steal. He talked nonsense, not punch-lines, per se. It was a great performance thing he did and his timing was impeccable. Pat Paulsen was a master of comedy too. The Smothers Brothers' strength was not in the content, but how it was said. We had a couple of our albums, including the Purple Onion album, translated in script form. It didn't work at all. It is no wonder that writers had a hard time writing for the Smothers Brothers, because they wrote impressions, but there was something else.

I've been Catholic all my life, and there's one thing I've never understood. Why didn't the Corinthians write back?

I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.

I write fiction because it's a way of making statements I can disown.

I show up in my writing room at approximately 10 A.M. every morning without fail. Sometimes my muse sees fit to join me there and sometimes she doesn't, but she always knows where I'll be. She doesn't need to go hunting in the taverns or on the beach or drag the boulevard looking for me.

Business book writing for me is when some set of ideas gets stuck in my mind, I write a book about it. I haven't got a theory and I haven't got a framework.

If you asked me to write a rock song or a rap song, I couldn't do it because they're not in my fingers.

Whether it's acting, directing or writing, I want to be involved in the film industry for the rest of my life.

It is an impressively arrogant move to conclude that just because you don’t like something, it is empirically not good. I don’t like Chinese food, but I don’t write articles trying to prove it doesn’t exist.