Writing Quotes - Page 254

Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.

The imagination can be dangerous. It can change the world. And that is why we write.

When I'm writing, I write. And then it's as if the muse is convinced that I'm serious and says, 'Okay. Okay. I'll come.'

Writing is like a love affair: the beginning is the best part.

You cannot write for children They're much too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them.

When you're in love with the work, the energy comes more naturally. You want to wake up in the morning to write more material, or to go on stage and give every shred of emotion you have.

I'm pretty lenient with myself about time - if I feel like taking photographs of small things inside ice cubes or making animal collages, I just do it. When I want to write, I write. It's all part of the same thing for me.

I came to accept in myself a long time ago that I really do like writing articulate sociopaths.

I had at some point the epiphany that if I wanted to be a writer, maybe I should stop thinking about writing, or stop writing about writing, and actually write.

I don't understand the feeling of, the way people speak of writing as though it were, like, some kind of djinn to be summoned or like it's the Loch Ness monster or seeing a shooting star. It's a physical act. It is a thing you do with your muscles and your body and your willpower. Watch, I'll show you: get a piece of paper. Get a pencil. Put the pencil on the paper and write the word 'something.'

I'm trying to figure out how to record at home because I have a tiny house and a seven-year-old and my wife also works at home. So I can't work in the house because she's trying to write, so I pitched a tent in the backyard. I'm literally trying to record in the tent.

There are different rules for reading, for thinking, and for talking. Writing blends all three of them.

Creativity makes a leap, then looks to see where it is.

America is indeed a revelation, though not quite the one that was planned. Given a clean slate, man, it was hoped, would write the future. Instead, he has written his past.

To be quite honest, along with thinking and such when it comes to writing, I'm not into words like "theory." I'm a PhD dropout. No matter how many twenty-five-page papers I wrote, I never felt like I was saying much. I didn't feel like the writer of the book, whose work I was analyzing, would have been impressed. It didn't matter how much time or effort I put in.

I think the closest thing I can come to defining what that vital thing is for me - is that there's a sort of soul-quality in writing, if it's any good. It has a spirit or an energy to it that is very integral to who the writer is on a deep level. It's almost a cellular thing. It takes place in the cells of the writing, and it is what makes it alive or not.

All these things that enter your head are assignments. You write them up and then throw them out there and if someone wants to do it, your assignment is done.

When I am angry I can write, pray, and preach well, for then my whole temperament is quickened, my understanding sharpened, and all mundane vexations and temptations depart.

People frequently comment on the emptiness in one night stands, but emptiness here has always been just another word for darkness. Blind encounters writing sonnets no one can ever read. Desire and pain communicated in the vague language of sex. None of which made sense to me until much later when I realized everything I thought I'd retained of my encounters added up to so very little, hardly enduring, just shadows of love outlining nothing at all.

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

I've been trying to write really simple songs to make them sound like they're coming out of a satellite that's crashing into a gas giant or something.

I don't remember deciding to become a writer. You decide to become a dentist or a postman. For me, writing is like being gay. You finally admit that this is who you are, you come out and hope that no one runs away.

Who else but the maestro of mathematical creativity, Clifford Pickover, to curate a museum of Strange Brains and write biographies of the scientific geniuses who formerly owned them? I'll never look at a pigeon, a pearl, or a Wheatstone bridge the same way again.

I think I actually did write about love because I kind of had a fear of it, like we all do, nobody wants to get hurt.

While you're writing, you can't concentrate nearly as well on what the speaker is saying.