Writing Quotes - Page 262

The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.

Writing your name can lead to writing sentences. And the next thing you'll be doing is writing paragraphs, and then books. And then you'll be in as much trouble as I am!

I am glad that the country world...retains a power to use our English tongue. It is a part of its sense of reality, of its vocabulary of definite terms, and of its habit of earthly common sense. I find this country writing an excellent corrective of the urban vocabulary of abstractions and of the emotion disguised as thinking which abstractions and humbug have loosed upon the world. May there always be such things as a door, a milk pail, and a loaf of bread, and words to do them honor.

To live is to war with trolls in heart and woul. To write is to sit in judgement on oneself.

My writing has developed drastically . The Return of the Prodigal Son is the most important thing I've done, and my most mature book.

On of the reasons that I wanted to study literature was because it exposed everything. Writers looked for secrets that had never been mined. Every writer has to invent their own magical language, in order to describe the indescribable. They might seem to be writing in French, English, or Spanish, but really they were writing in the language of butterflies, crows, and hanged men.

I have no idea! I have been writing for 35 years and from the beginning up to now the situation's almost the same. I'm kind of an ugly duckling. Always the duckling, never the swan.

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them.

I did not write it (Uncle Tom's Cabin). God wrote it. I merely did his dictation.

The readers are the ones who let us live our dreams. I try to write books which are really compelling - that you'd take on vacation and rather than going out, you'd read in your hotel room because you had to find out what happened. Hopefully that's what readers are responding to.

If you're not inspired and you're working hard to pull inspiration from somewhere and make a song something it's not, then it's very contrived and I don't like to write music that's contrived.

It usually takes me 20 to 90 minutes to write a song because once I start, I don't stop. I like when it's really organic, so I try to knock it out in one shot.

Writing is not a great profession as a lot of writers proclaim. I write because this is something I can do. Another thing—very often I think a lot of writers write because they have failed to do other things. How many writers can’t drive? A lot. They’re not practical. They are not capable in everyday life.

You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something.

Endless conflicts. Endless misunderstanding. All life is that. Great and little cannot understand one another.

Writing is the starting point from which all goodness (and crappiness) flows.

I like acting and things when I like the writing. If I don't like the writing, I don't like acting. I think in some ways everything starts for me from the place of writing.

Along with a lot of other things, becoming a Bob Dylan fan made me a writer. I was never interested in figuring out what the songs meant. I was interested in figuring out my response to them, and other people's responses. I wanted to get closer to the music than I could by listening to it - I wanted to get inside of it, behind it, and writing about it through it, inside of it, behind it, was my way of doing that.

I was talking to Jackson Browne on the phone. He said, 'I'm the slowest writer in the world.' I said, 'No, no, no. You're the second slowest. It seems the older you get the slower they come. I wonder if it is like that for everybody?' He said, 'It ain't with Don Henley. He seems to be writing more than ever.'"

Then in my early teens, when the home computer bubble was blowing, I had one of the first, an Acorn Atom, and used to write primitive adventures on that.

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head.

Write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!

The brain that doesn't feed itself, eats itself.

Never be sincere - sincerity is the death of writing.

... there is ... a big aspect of play in writing novels, and making the story more and more elaborate is just more and more fun.