Writing Quotes - Page 260

Don't get it right, just get it written.

Anyone living in Los Angeles who has opposable thumbs is required to write a screenplay.

If you can write each day, do it, and meet a quota. Minimum 350 words a day. A baboon can do 350 words a day. Don't be shown up by a baboon

My philosophy on writing books is that if you learn only one new thing, or even get a new take on something you already know, it's worth it.

The basic thing is to be humble, and pretend you're a bartender in the tavern of life. Don't get too comfortable and don't really listen to anybody else. Don't stand around with a bunch of writers and talk about writing. You know when you see plumbers at a plumbers convention, usually they're not talking about plumbing: they're talking about whatever it is that two men happen to talk about. They're talking about sports, their wives and children. I just tell my students, don't talk about writing too much, just go out and do it. Find out whatever you need to get to the mainland.

Congress shall have Power . . . to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Time to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

What's in a name? That is what we ask ourselves in childhood when we write the name that we are told is ours.

Suppose that throughout your childhood you were good with numbers. Other kids used to copy your homework. You figured store discounts faster than your parents. People came to you for help with such things. So you took accounting and eventually became a tax auditor for the IRS. What an embarrassing job, right? You feel you should be writing poetry or doing aviation mechanics or whatever. But then you realize that tax collecting can be a calling too.

L.A. ispolluted. It's overpopulated. But it is very much home. It was inevitable for me, the moving back. I was living in San Francisco, and Joan broke it off with me, and I needed a place to live. I'd been divorced. And I needed to write movies and TV shows to earn a living. Alimony. All that. So I figured what the hell, I'll go back to L.A.

It takes an awful lot of time for me to write anything. I have endless drafts, one after another; and I try out 50, 75, or a hundred variations on a single line sometimes. I work on the process of refining low-grade ore. I get maybe a couple of nu ggets of gold out of 50 tons of dirt. It is tough for me. No, I am not inspired.

To write about business one should be in business, just as in writing about Tasmania one should visit Tasmania.

Buffon, who, with all his theoretical ingenuity and extraordinary eloquence, I suspect had little actual information in the science on which he wrote so admirably For instance, he tells us that the cow sheds her horns every two years; a most palpable error. ... It is wonderful that Buffon who lived so much in the country at his noble seat should have fallen into such a blunder I suppose he has confounded the cow with the deer.

You write in order to change the world ... if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.

Any serious man or woman in search of spiritual ideas will find a surprising challenge and an authentic source of inspiration and intellectual nourishment in the writings of Paul Brunton.

I'm a storyteller, I'm not a literary writer, and I don't want to be a literary writer. People say to me, "Oh, when are you going to write something different?" What? I don't want to write anything different. I'm writing relationships between people, all different colors, all different sizes, all different sexual orientations, and that's what I want to do.

The less a writer discusses his work and himself the better. The master chef slaughters no chickens in the dining room; the doctor writes prescriptions in Latin; the magician hides his hinges, mirrors, and trapdoors with the utmost care.

Don't loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don't get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it.

Even time is a concept. In reality we are always in the eternal present. The past is just a memory, the future just an image or thought. All our stories about past and future are only ideas, arising in the moment. Our modern culture is so tyrannized by goals, plans, and improvement schemes that we constantly live for the future. But as Aldous Huxley reminded us in his writings, "An idolatrous religion is one in which time is substituted for eternity...the idea of endless progress is the devil's work, even today demanding human sacrifice on an enormous scale.

Keep it kickwriting at all costs too, that is, write only what kicks you and keeps you overtime awake from sheer mad joy.

Writing, therefore, is also an act of courage. How much easier is it to lead an unexamined life than to confront yourself on the page? How much easier is it to surrended to materialism or cynicism or to a hundred other ways of life that are, in fact, ways to hide from life and from our fears. When we write, we resist the facile seduction of theses simpler roads. We insist on finding out and declaring the truths that we find, and we dare to out those truths on the page.

I'm an aspiring writer. I hate that phrase. You're either a writer or you're not.

The finder of his theme will be at no loss for words.

Until the lion learns to write, every story will glorify the hunter.

Like everyone else, I am going to die. But the words - the words live on for as long as there are readers to see them, audiences to hear them. It is immortality by proxy. It is not really a bad deal, all things considered.

You can have a very intense relationship with fictional characters because they are in your own head.