Writing Quotes - Page 68

Literature is a form of permanent insurrection. Its mission is to arouse, to disturb, to alarm, to keep men in a constant state of dissatisfaction with themselves.

We are motivated by a keen desire for praise, and the better a man is the more he is inspired by glory. The very philosophers themselves, even in those books which they write in contempt of glory, inscribe their names.

You can sit there, tense and worried, freezing the creative energies, or you can start writing something. It doesn't matter what. In five or ten minutes, the imagination will heat, the tightness will fade, and a certain spirit and rhythm will take over.

We are so programmed to feel that our emotions are the most important thing in the Universe...We write, produce and act in the story of me. And then we write reviews - and read them and get more depressed. All we can do is let go, and that comes from training. And then we spend less and less time in the darker spaces.

If you're in it because you love it and you have to do it, that's the right reason. If you're in it because you want to get rich or famous, don't do it. People often say that my first years in Nashville, when I wasn't getting anything cut, were tough. Hell, those were great years.

If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.

I use Mac. Not because it's more secure than everything else - because it is actually less secure than Windows - but I use it because it is still under the radar. People who write malicious code want the greatest return on their investment, so they target Windows systems. I still work with Windows in virtual machines.

Like everyone else, I was born naked and screaming, waiting for my life to write itself on my skin.

Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.

The only hope I had was when (in his youth)I saw one day a photograph of a sculpture by Wilhelm Lehmbruck, a German sculptor of expressionistic style. This was perhaps the only example, Lehmbruck, between my sixteenth to nineteenth years in which I saw a possibility for art to be principally of interest to innovate some things, instead of writing a very boring, naturalistic repetition of what is already done by nature.

The place of stillness that you have to go to to write, but also to read seriously, is the point where you can actually make responsible decisions, where you can actually engage productively with an otherwise scary and unmanageable world.

The country will some day pay for the stupidities of those who were in the majority on this commission. They know as much about the future of aviation as they do about the sign writing of the Aztecs.

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.

How much there is I want to do! I always feel that I haven't time to accomplish what I wish. I want to read much. I wanted to write a great deal. I want to make money.

The only book that is worth writing is the one we don’t have the courage or strength to write. The book that hurts us (we who are writing), that makes us tremble, redden, bleed

If I knew where good songs came from, I'd go there more often.

When I write, the first blank page, or any blank page, means nothing to me. What means something is a page that has been filled with words.

Some people think it is difficult to be a Christian and to laugh, but I think it's the other way around. God writes a lot of comedy, its just that he has so many bad actors.

To me, one of the greatest triumphs in doing a book is to tell the story as simply as possible. My aim is to imply rather than to overstate. Whenever the reader participates with his own interpretation, I feel that the book is much more successful. I write with the premise that less is more. Writing is not difficult to me. I read into a tape recorder, constantly dropping a word here and there from my manuscript until I get a minimum amount of words to say exactly what I want to say. Each time I drop a word or two, it brings me a sense of victory!

A writer never has a vacation. For a writer, life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.

It's all the unwordable things one wants to write about, just as it's all the unformable things one wants to paint - essence.

I can't paint. I can't write. I can't sing. But I can decorate and run a house, and light it, and heat it, and have it like a living thing.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.

You find yourself by losing yourself. By not thinking about yourself all of the time. When I am in a slump with my writing, I'll go and walk for a week. Walk and not see a human being. Something happens after four or five days which is quite wonderful. It is an ancient thing. Your sense of smell. Your hearing. They come back.

I was very against pink and purple when I was young, because they were girls' colors. But that was only because I didn't want people to write me off for what I can do. When I got into my 20s, I decided that was stupid.