Writing Quotes - Page 61

If you want to be a writer, write. Write and write and write. If you stop, start again. Save everything that you write. If you feel blocked, write through it until you feel your creative juices flowing again. Write. Writing is what makes a writer, nothing more and nothing less.

The ratio of literacy to illiteracy is constant, but nowadays the illiterates can read and write.

A villain must be a thing of power, handled with delicacy and grace. He must be wicked enough to excite our aversion, strong enough to arouse our fear, human enough to awaken some transient gleam of sympathy. We must triumph in his downfall, yet not barbarously nor with contempt, and the close of his career must be in harmony with all its previous development.

I consider the process of gestation just as important as when you're actually sitting down putting words to the paper.

Don't be 'a writer'. Be writing.

For the writer, there is nothing quite like having someone say that he or she understands, that you have reached them and affected them with what you have written.

I would love to hear someone write a song like 'He Stopped Loving Her Today' rather than 'You're hot. I'm hot. We're in a truck.' It's just mind-numbing to me.

There are things we never tell anyone. We want to but we can't. So we write them down. Or we paint them. Or we sing about them. It's our only option. To remember. To attempt to discover the truth. Sometimes we do it to stay alive. These things, they live inside of us. They are the secrets we stash in our pockets and the weapons we carry like guns across our backs. And in the end we have to decide for ourselves when these things are worth fighting for, and when it's time to throw in the towel.

I'm really glad that I'm not Anna because I don't want to be there again. I've been there. But when something does happen to me, whether it's that movie or whether it's actually happened to me, I feel that it's my duty to actually share that with all of you guys. I want to immediately go to my desk and start writing about it.

A computer does not substitute for judgment any more than a pencil substitutes for literacy. But writing without a pencil is no particular advantage.

I did write some code in Java once, but that was the island in Indonesia.

Let me tell you what I do know: I am more than one thing, and not all of those things are good. The truth is complicated. It’s two-toned, multi-vocal, bittersweet. I used to think that if I dug deep enough to discover something sad and ugly, I’d know it was something true. Now I’m trying to dig deeper. I didn’t want to write these pages until there were no hard feelings, no sharp ones. I do not have that luxury. I am sad and angry and I want everyone to be alive again. I want more landmarks, less landmines. I want to be grateful but I’m having a hard time with it.

Measure your minds height by the shadow it casts.

Write something insightful. Say Morgan Freeman said it. Win at internet.

Creativity sometimes needs the protection of darkness, of being ignored. That is very obvious in the natural tendency many artists and writers have not to show their paintings or writings before they are finished.

Good books, like good friends, are few and chosen; the more select, the more enjoyable.

The Mathematician's Shiva is a brilliant and compelling family saga full of warmth, pathos, history, and humor, not to mention a cast of delightfully quirky characters, and a math lesson or two; all together, a winning equation! When Rojstaczer writes about mathematics, you'd think he was writing about poetry.

I write with experiences in mind, but I don't write about them, I write out of them.

How lucky is the man who, like Mozart and others, goes to the tavern of an evening and writes some fresh music. For he lives while he is creating.

If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.

Anything that isn't writing is easy

Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.

There will never be another now - I'll make the most of today. There will never be another me - I'll make the most of myself.

The writing gets done away from the keyboard and away from the studio in my head, in solitude. And then I come in and hopefully have something, then I wrestle with sounds and picture all day long. But the ideas usually come from a more obscure place, like a conversation with a director, a still somebody shows you, or whatever.

Writing is like sausage making in my view; you'll all be happier in the end if you just eat the final product without knowing what's gone into it.