Writing Quotes - Page 36

Your life story would not make a good book. Don't even try.

You care enough, that you want your life to be fulfilled in a living way, not in a painting way, not in a writing way...you really do want it to be involving in living, corresponding with other living objects, moving, changing, that kind of thing.

The writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do... Writing is a process of dealing with not-knowing, a forcing of what and how.

The best tip for writing is just to write; to sit down and write, to begin doing it and not to be scared by the blank page.

An artist's sensitivity to criticism is, at least in part, an effort to keep unimpaired the zest, or confidence, or arrogance, which he needs to make creation possible; or an instinct to climb through his problems in his own way as he should, and must.

Just tell the truth, and they'll accuse you of writing black humor.

Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.

I'll make music, whether or not anyone is listening, for the rest of my life. It's a natural form of expression for me, the same way I draw and write and sing.

I am building a stairway to the stars. I have the authority to take the whole of mankind up there with me. That is why I write.

The shorter and the plainer the better.

What makes for great art is the courage to speak and write and paint what you know and care about.

I hate commas in the wrong places.

Short stories can be rather stark and bare unless you put in the right details. Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.

Literary history and the present are dark with silences . . . I have had special need to learn all I could of this over the years, myself so nearly remaining mute and having to let writing die over and over again in me. These are not natural silences--what Keats called agonie ennuyeuse (the tedious agony)--that necessary time for renewal, lying fallow, gestation, in the natural cycle of creation. The silences I speak of here are unnatural: the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot.

The important thing in writing is the capacity to astonish. Not shock - shock is a worn-out word - but astonish.

Writing should be an adventure, shrouded in mystery and uncertainty, blessed with amazing grace. In theory, of course

Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.

There are many rules of good writing, but the best way to find them is to be a good reader.

What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.

All writing is discipline, but screenwriting is a drill sergeant.

Let there be no inscription upon my tomb; let no man write my epitaph: no man can write my epitaph.

So long as the Constitution is not amended beyond recognition, so long as elections are held regularly and fairly and the ethos of secularism broadly prevails, so long as citizens can speak and write in the language of their choosing, so long as there is an integrated market and a moderately efficient civil service and army, and — lest I forget — so long as Hindi films are watched and their songs sung, India will survive

There are no mistakes or accidents. The present is malleable. Influence the odds. Free will is your pen, write your life.

Screenwriting is like ironing. You move forward a little bit and go back and smooth things out.

If you wanna write a song, ask a guitar