Writing Quotes - Page 258

Becoming the reader is the essence of becoming a writer.

Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.

I need some kind of emotional stake in it to write my lyrics, assuming that place. It might just be an emotion I understand but am not currently experiencing necessarily.

It’s time to write dangerous music. It’s time to take risks. It’s time to wear your heart on your sleeve, and sing about the things that actually matter to you. It’s time to bury the shackles of religious expectation and stop trying to put new clothes on the dead.

Songwriting is like ... being possessed. You try to go to sleep but the song won't let you.

I can't pass up a blank book when I see it in a bookstore. And I write a sentence in it, and then I put it away.

Ask yourself my love whether you are not very cruel to have so entrammelled me, so destroyed my freedom. Will you confess this in the Letter you must write immediately, and do all you can to console me in it — make it rich as a draught of poppies to intoxicate me —write the softest words and kiss them that I may at least touch my lips where yours have been. For myself I know not how to express my devotion to so fair a form: I want a brighter word than bright, a fairer word than fair.

I am convinced more and more day by day that fine writing is next to fine doing, the top thing in the world.

The book works better if I know everything I can about the ending. Not just what happens, but how it happens and what the language is; not just the last sentence, but enough of the sentences surrounding that last sentence to know what the tone of voice is. I imagined it as something almost musical. Then you are writing toward something; you know the sound of your voice at the end of the story. That's how you want to sound in those final sentences: the degree that it is uplifting or not, the degree that it is melancholic or not.

I feel more a part of the wrestling community than I feel I belong to the community of arts and letters. Why? Because wrestling requires even more dedication than writing because wrestling represents the most difficult and rewarding objective that I have ever dedicated myself to; because wrestling and wrestling coaches are among the most disciplined and self-sacrificing people I have ever known.

A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.

I don't trust myself enough. When I write, I overwrite. Gingerbread. Too much gingerbread. Writing is probably the only hobby I have. But I wish I had another one. If I was just a little better at golf.

A common and usually unfortunate answer is “Write about what you know.” Nothing can be more limiting to the imagination, nothing is quicker to turn on the psyche's censoring devices and distortion systems, than trying to write truthfully.

I write songs because I have to write them, and if I didn't I'd be doing some other kind of music that didn't require a song.

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

Writing is the great skill, the creative skill. The acting is more an interpretative skill. And the thrill for me is the moment when I think of something. And then the challenge is how to get that funny idea to work in terms of the structure and that kind of thing, which is - and that's what I really love doing.

Within a single scene, it seems to be unwise to have access to the inner reflections of more than one character. The reader generally needs a single character as the means of perception, as the character to whom the events are happening, as the character with whom he is to empathize in order to have the events of the writing happen to him.

Fiction must compete with first-rate reporting. If you cannot write a story that is equal to a factual account of battle in the streets or demonstrations, then you can't write a story.

For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain and the noise of battle. It has the power to give grief or universality that lends it a youthful beauty.

Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.

I believe that writing is an account of the powers of extrication.

Paper should be edible, nutritious. Inks used for printing or writing should have delicious flavors. Magazines or newspapers read at breakfast should be eaten for lunch. Instead of throwing one's mail in the waste-basket, it should be saved for the dinner guests.

I think that books for young people should have serious and important themes, they shouldn't be trivial. So the books I write, they would be the kind of stories you would write in an adult novel only they just happen to feature a child at the center of them.

The first obligation of the writer is to be interesting. To be interesting; not to change the world.

Alone with our madness and favorite flower We see that there really is nothing left to write about. Or rather, it is necessary to write about the same old things In the same way, repeating the same things over and over For love to continue and be gradually different.