Writing Quotes - Page 63

The work saved me. I clung to it like flotsam in a boiling sea. It was the only solitary sport that I ever played, or was any good at. It felt natural to sit at my computer and type and type some more. For entire minutes, while writing, I could forget the godawful thing that had happened. I could forget that nothing really mattered anymore. Perhaps, if I set my sights low, I could care again about some small thing. I would type a word. One word. Then another. I started to care about the words, then entire sentences.

I have a slogan I use when I get anxious writing, which happens quite a bit: ‘the ordeal is part of the commitment.’ It’s one of my mantras. It makes a lot of things doable.

As a writer, I need an enormous amount of time alone. Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It's 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. Having anybody watching that or attempting to share it with me would be grisly.

Those who fear the imagination condemn it: something childish, they say, something monsterish, misbegotten. Not all of us dream awake. But those of us who do have no choice.

On December 12, 1829, Paganini wrote his friend Germi: "The variations I've composed on the graceful Neapolitan ditty, 'Oh Mamma, Mama Cara,' outshine everything. I can't describe it!" He was writing from Karlsruhe, in the midst of his triumphal tour through Germany. That letter marks the earliest known mention of the variations that would become famous as "The Carnival of Venice." At the time of his letter, Paganini had already performed the piece in at least four concerts. From then on, it would be one of his most popular compositions.

As a writer of worship songs, I have a hunger to write deep songs of passionate reverence to God. Yet I'm aware I cannot sing before I have seen. All worship is a response to a revelation--it's only as we breathe in more of the wonders of God that we can breathe out a fuller response to Him....the key to a life of passionate and powerful worship comes from seeing God.

Writers are the exorcists of their own demons.

Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that's wrong. They know less, that's why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.

Adventure is just a romantic name for trouble. It sounds swell when you write about it, but it's hell when you meet it face to face in a dark and lonely place.

When something is bothering me, I write a song that tells my feelings.

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad.

At this writing I can't even shut my lower jaw because of inadequate health care. I can't chew my food, I have trouble walking...the list goes on. But more than anything I want to go home. If you follow the laws at the time of my conviction I should have been released already.

I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.

Every writer I know has trouble writing.

It doesn't matter. I have books, new books, and I can bear anything as long as there are books.

Whenever I'm out of town for at least a week, I feel like I should write a postcard or something, but you can be a genius, you try and write a postcard you come across like a moron anyway: 'This city's got big buildings. I like food. Bye.'

A book in a man's brain is better off than a book bound in calf - at any rate it is safer from criticism.

Writing is a delicious agony.

Generally, my writing is influenced by living, by absorbing everything that happens to me and my actions.

I think myself I ought to be shot for writing such nonsense.... But it's unquestionably good escapist literature and I think I should rather like it if I were sitting in an air-raid shelter or recovering from flu.

Never think, because you cannot write a letter easily, that it is better not to write at all. The most awkward note imaginable is better than none.

There are 30,000 days in your life. When I was 24, I realized I’m almost 9,000 days down. There are no warm-ups, no practice rounds, no reset buttons. Your biggest risk isn’t failing, it’s getting too comfortable. Every day we’re writing a few more words of a story. I wanted my story to be an adventure and that’s made all the difference. Instead of trying to make your life perfect, give yourself the freedom to make it an adventure, and go ever upward.

I write probably 80 percent of my stuff over the winter.

He is an emancipated thinker who is not afraid to write foolish things.

Writing in a diary is a really strange experience for someone like me. Not only because I’ve never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year old school girl. Oh well, it doesn’t matter. I feel like writing.