Writing Quotes - Page 246

If you want to grow in writing songs that will express the wonders of God, immerse yourself in God.

Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God. They never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their individual lives. They waste their years in vain efforts to be some other poet, some other saint...They wear out their minds and bodies in a hopeless endeavor to have somebody else's experiences or write somebody else's poems.

The only medicine for suffering, crime, and all other woes of mankind, is wisdom. Teach a man to read and write, and you have put into his hands the great keys of the wisdom box. But it is quite another thing to open the box.

Never be entirely idle; but either be reading, or writing, or praying or meditating or endeavoring something for the public good.

I don't write lyrics, the lyrics write Thom Yorke

I don't know why, but I always feel a kind of necessity to write things that are beyond acceptance, that are too offensive or something. For people to read them and say, Ha-ha-ha, very funny. No, we can't print that.

The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.

I can direct things but I can't write. My memory is going, so I struggle for words.

The decisions that we write off as momentary, insignificant, incidental, everyday encounters are exactly when we have a chance to define ourselves. To find beauty. To engage the world around us. To create memories.

I really enjoy English and poetry and writing classes. You do get writer's block when you're writing music, and having inspiration from other great writers is great. You have to look for inspiration because sometimes music isn't the only thing that you can look at.

I'm always writing. It's kind of a curse: You never stop. But I need isolation to write. So the real meat of the material comes when I'm off the road.

I write about what I know, what I live, what I observe.

I want to live in Kolkata; I don't want to live in Europe - I can't write there. I write in Bengali, and I need to be surrounded by the Bengali language and culture.

I could write for hours on the lustfulness of moving Swiftly.

A writer must have all the confidence in the world when writing the first draft and none whatsoever when editing subsequent drafts.

I wish I could write librettos for the rest of my life. It is the purest of human pleasures, a heavenly hermaphroditism of being both writer and musician. No wonder that selfish beast Wagner kept it all to himself.

So you got rid of your astonishment that someone could write so much more dynamically than you. You stopped cherishing your aloneness and poetic differentness to your delicately flat little bosom. You said: she's to good to forget. How about making her a friend and competitor — you could learn alot from her. So you'll try. So maybe she'll laugh in your face. So maybe she'll beat you hollow in the end. So anyhow, you'll try, and maybe, possibly, she can stand you. Here's hoping!

Even after I'd published three books and had been writing full-time for twenty years, my father continued to urge me to go to law school.

Too many Americans have twisted the sensible right to pursue happiness into the delusion that we are entitled to a guarantee of happiness. If we don't get exactly what we want, we assume someone must be violating our rights. We're no longer willing to write off some of life's disappointments to simple bad luck.

How is it possible on the one hand, for example, to behave as if nothing on earth were more important than literature, and on the other fail to see that wherever one looks, people are struggling against hunger and will necessarily consider that the most important thing is what they earn at the end of the month? Because this is where he (the writer) is confronted with a new paradox: while all he wanted was to write for those who are hungry, he now discovers that it is only those who have plenty to eat who have the leisure to take notice of his existence.

I remember Prince gave me a cassette of Purple Rain. It was like 20 minutes long and he asked me to write something on it. I tried for a month and then he came to L.A. I went to see him and said, "I can't do it. It's too perfect. It's like 'Stairway to Heaven.'" He said OK and then I go, "I can keep the cassette, right?" He said, "Of course and thank you for trying."

What I mean is that none of my talents had a - what's that great word - rubric. A singer, an actor, a dancer - there was nothing I could really say I was. The writing came much later. And, actually, thank God, because if I had said I'm a singer, I would really have just had one thing to do.

I wish developing great products was as easy as writing a check. If that was the case, Microsoft would have great products.

Deciding what is to be sung and what is not to be sung is really what writing a musical is about.

I write about rats because they scare the hell out of me. I think we tend to write out our phobias.