Writing Quotes - Page 55

Handwriting is civilization's casual encephalogram.

After I had been studying with him for two years, Schoenberg said, ‘In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony.’ I explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, ‘In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.’

Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.

It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.

And the wind will whip your tousled hair, The sun, the rain, the sweet despair, Great tales of love and strife. And somewhere on your path to glory You will write your story of a life.

Remember that the animals and plants have no M.P. they can write to; they can't perform sit-down strikes or, indeed, strikes of any sort; they have nobody to speak for them except us, the human beings who share the world with them but do not own it.

Writing tends to cheer me; it always soothes my spirit and blesses me with the gift of an innocent, tender, childlike day. It is the sensation of having spent a few hours in my homeland, with my customs, free whims, my total freedom.

No art ever came out of not risking your neck.

Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. ... Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them.

It's the technique, I think, of writing a novel that is difficult for a nonfiction writer.

You start by writing to live. You end by writing so as not to die.

Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer.

I have a theory that you can make any sentence seem profound by writing the name of a dead philosopher at the end of it.

I don't pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about.

If Mark Twain had had Twitter, he would have been amazing at it. But he probably wouldn't have gotten around to writing Huckleberry Finn.

I want my stories to be something about life that causes people to say, not, oh, isn't that the truth, but to feel some kind of reward from the writing, and that doesn't mean that it has to be a happy ending or anything, but just that everything the story tells moves the reader in such a way that you feel you are a different person when you finish.

I tend to avoid writing music about initial reactions to situations, like frustration or anger. I’d rather wait till I go through the problem, and write about the learning that took place.

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.

Unless you have tested the assumptions in your business model first, outside the building, your business plan is just creative writing.

Whatever you write about me, don't make it sad.

Against the disease of writing one must take special precautions, since it is a dangerous and contagious disease.

The manner in which I learned to read and write, not only had great influence on my own mind, as I acquired it with the most perfect ease, so much so, that I have no recollection whatever of learning the alphabet.

All good ideas arrive by chance.

I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English - it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in.

Diamonds are nothing more than chunks of coal that stuck to their jobs.