Writing Quotes - Page 60

Sometimes you're writing a song and you have an image whilst writing a song. I don't think you ever base a songwriting process around a video, but when you're writing a song sometimes it'll be a very visual song.

If you look at Iraq and Afghanistan's situations, they are quickly becoming much like our reservations. They will have puppet governments funded and controlled by a U.S. Government that siphoned off their resources. You don't have to be an English major to read the writing on the wall; I am in here as a warning to others, just like those men who are in Guantanamo are a warning to others - if you stand up to us you face these same consequences.

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.

If somebody writes a great poem, people don't run around applauding the pencil, saying 'Oh, what a great pencil'...I'm a pencil in God's hands.

Close reading of tough-minded writing is still the best, cheapest, and quickest method known for learning to think for yourself... Reading, and rigorous discussion of that reading in a way that obliges you to formulate a position and support it against objections, is an operational definition of education... reading, analysis, and discussion is the way we develop reliable judgment, the principle way we come to penetrate covert movements behind the facade of public appearances.

No nation ancient or modern ever lost the liberty of freely speaking, writing, or publishing their sentiments, but forthwith lost their liberty in general and became slaves.

Language has not the power to speak what love indites: The soul lies buried in the ink that writes.

I think it's great some hotels provide stationery. Because the first thing I like to do when I get to a hotel room is write a letter. "My dearest Gwendolyn, I arrived by nightfall at the Embassy Suites. It will be a fortnight after my return that this letter shall arrive. Allow me to explain the curious charge at the ledger. It is because I miss thee so much, darling, I accidentally ordered Sorrority Sisters 7."

All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. And then there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don't matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake.

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter.

Do nothing that you would not like God to see. Say nothing you would not like God to hear. Write nothing you would not like God to read. Go no place where you would not like God to find you. Read no book of which you would not like God to say, "Show it to Me." Never spend your time in such a way that you would not like to have God say, "What are you doing?

If you think you're boring your audience, go slower not faster.

What you are lies with you. If you are lazy, and accept your lot, you may live in it. If you are willing to work, you can write your name anywhere you choose, among the only ones who live beyond the grave in this world, the people who write books that help, make exquisite music, carve statues, paint pictures, and work for others. Never mind the calico dress, and the coarse shoes. Work at you books, and before long you will hear yesterday's tormentors boasting that they were once classmates of yours.

Be anything you want to be, but don't be dull.

While clothes with pictures and/or writing on them are not entirely an invention of the modern age, they are an unpleasant indication of the general state of things. ... I mean, be realistic. If people don't want to listen to you, what makes you think they want to hear from your sweater?

Every night before you go to bed write down three things good that happened to you that day. That's pretty much all it takes to get a happiness boost over time.

You can't learn to play the piano without playing the piano, you can't learn to write without writing, and, in many ways, you can't learn to think without thinking. Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard.

No it is not easy to write. It is as hard as breaking rocks. Sparks and splinters fly like shattered steel.

Anyway, these books I love, they’re all books by men—every last one of them. Because if it’s unseemly and possibly dangerous for a man to be angry, it’s totally unacceptable for a woman to be angry. I wanted to write a voice that for me, as a reader, had been missing from the chorus: the voice of an angry woman.

I think of myself as a guy who tries to write screenplays and now has tried to direct one. Anything more than that is meaningless and it gets in the way of being a real human being.

Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.

Write the book you want to read, the one you cannot find.

The learned fool writes his nonsense in better language than the unlearned, but it is still nonsense.

Write regularly, day in and day out, at whatever times of day you find that you write best. Don't wait till you feel that you are in the mood. Write, whether you are feeling inclined to write or not.