Writing Quotes - Page 90

Teach yourself to work in uncertainty.

It's very hard to teach someone how to write a song if to begin with there's no creative crop to harvest.

Words are a lens to focus one's mind.

At times I enjoy writing and at others times I just hate it because it's definitely having to go back and experience some pain and express what you really feel.

I either write the book or sell the jewels. And I'm kinda sentimental about the jewels.

Clarity in language depends on clarity in thought.

Geisha because when I was living in Japan, I met a fellow whose mother was a geisha, and I thought that was kind of fascinating and ended up reading about the subject just about the same time I was getting interested in writing fiction.

I'm going to write a book someday and the title will be I'm an Ass, You're an Ass. That's the most liberating, wonderful thing in the world, when you openly admit you're an ass. It's wonderful. When people tell me, You're wrong I say, What can you expect of an ass?

When I started writing a business column 15 years ago, I knew I'd found the perfect job for myself. As a columnist I could pick my own topic, do my own analysis, say what I wanted to say and attribute it to myself. Best of all, I could write in my own voice.

writing is a labor of love and also an act of defiance, a way to light a candle in a gale wind.

Today in many western countries, nobody dares question the Holocaust whose nature is questionable. According to the reports I have received, in America if people decide to write something against homosexuality on the basis of psychological and sociological principles, they will be prevented from publishing their work. How is it that these people feel obligated to respect freedom of expression?

Beginning writers must appreciate the prerequisites if they hope to become writers. You pay your dues - which takes years.

The past actually happened. History is what someone took the time to write down.

Writing is not a special language that belongs to a few sensitive souls who have a 'gift for words'. Writing is the logical arrangement of thought. Anyone who thinks clearly should be able to write clearly---about any subject at all.

Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

Never use the word, 'very.' It is the weakest word in the English language; doesn't mean anything. If you feel the urge of 'very' coming on, just write the word, 'damn,' in the place of 'very.' The editor will strike out the word, 'damn,' and you will have a good sentence.

Play and write music the way you want the world to be.

I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.

I wish those people who write so glibly about this being a holy war and the orators who talk so much about going on, no matter how long the war lasts and what it may mean, could see a case of musterd gas - the poor things burnt and blistered all over with great musterd coloured suppurating blisters, with blind eyes, all sticky and stuck together, and always fighting for breath, with voices a mere whisper, saying their throats are closing and they know they will choke.

All of a sudden there's a song - there in your hotel room playing your guitar - and you write it, and two or three years later it will come true. It keeps you on your toes.

I tell my students there is such a thing as 'writer's block,' and they should respect it. You shouldn't write through it. It's blocked because it ought to be blocked, because you haven't got it right now.

One of the things that draws writers to writing is that they can get things right that they got wrong in real life by writing about them.

The habits of a lifetime when everything else had to come before writing are not easily broken, even when circumstances now often make it possible for writing to be first; habits of years - responses to others, distractibility, responsibility for daily matters - stay with you, mark you, become you. The cost of discontinuity (that pattern still imposed on women) is such a weight of things unsaid, an accumulation of material so great, that everything starts up something else in me; what should take weeks take me sometimes months to write; what should take months, takes years.

When I write, I don't allow the fear of consequences to interfere with the writing process. I have in the past paid for my commitment to the truth and the way I live my life. I am prepared to pay more if I have to.