Writing Quotes - Page 40

The act of writing bears something in common with the act of love. The writer, at his most productive moments, just flows. He gives of that which is uniquely himself. He makes himself naked, recording his nakedness in the written word. Herein lies some of the terror which frequently freezes a writer, preventing him from producing. Herein, too, lies some of the courage that must be entailed in letting others learn how one has experienced or is experiencing the world.

Those who claim to write about something larger and more significant than the self sometimes fail to comprehend the dimensions of self.

No one will argue that writing is an easy profession. Getting someone to pay you for your words isn’t easy. But there are strategies you can use to simplify the process and transform what you can produce.

It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.

I'm happy, I would say that I'm one of the happiest people I know but I've certainly had periods of profound sadness, depression and heartache and those are the kind of things that are interesting to me to write about.

People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

A book is so much a part of oneself that in delivering it to the public one feels as if one were pushing one's own child out into the traffic.

Writing is 90% procrastination. It is a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write.

Good education means learning to read, write and most importantly learn how to learn so that you can be whatever you want to be when you grow up.

I think everything I do has Howard Roark [hero of The Fountainhead] in it, you know, as much as anything. The person I write for is Howard Roark.

Probably "Mrs. Potato Head" or "Training Wheels". "Mrs. Potato Head" because it was the hardest song to write and it took me a while to finish it and feel good about the lyrical content. But I've had that idea in my head for so long, especially the visuals - pulling apart a Mrs. Potato face and how that doubled as a meaning for plastic surgery. "Training Wheels" because it's the only love song on the album.

Sometimes I think creativity is magic; it's not a matter of finding an idea, but allowing the idea to find you.

If there is a secret to writing, I haven’t found it yet. All I know is you need to sit down, clear your mind, and hang in there.

If you still persist in writing, "Good food at it's best", you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.

Teach the writer, not the writing.

If you are writing any book about the end of the world, what you are really writing about is what's worth saving about it.

But the sensibility of the writer, whether fiction or poetry, comes from paying attention. I tell my students that writing doesn't begin when you sit down to write. It's a way of being in the world, and the essence of it is paying attention.

Bad books on writing tell you to "WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW", a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery.

Writing a song is actually quite easy. Writing a good one is very, very difficult.

Talent is helpful in writing, but guts are absolutely necessary.

Your only responsibility as a writer is to be true to the story that has chosen you as its writer.

If we can't write diversity into sci-fi, then what's the point? You don't create new worlds to give them all the same limits of the old ones.

Anybody that forms a group, writes songs and releases records and says they don't care if people like them are complete liars.

All over the world the wildlife that I write about is in grave danger. It is being exterminated by what we call the progress of civilization.