Writing Quotes - Page 99

Most of the characteristics which make for success in writing are precisely those which we are all taught to repress ... the firm belief that you are an important person, that you are a lot smarter than most people, and that your ideas are so damned important that everybody should listen to you.

I think what education gives you is a voice. It gives you a way of talking to a judge. When a policeman pulls you off to the side of the road, you have a voice. When you cross a border, you have a voice. When you are writing to express your opinions, you have a voice.

In her novel Regeneration, Pat Barker writes of a doctor who 'knew only too well how often the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem of the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.

In writing if it takes over 30 minutes to write the first two paragraphs select another subject.

I don't need an alarm clock. My ideas wake me.

Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.

I suppose it never occurs to these people that a man might just want to write a piece of music.

I've always tried to insert consciousness and spirituality in my records, interpreting the writings of all cultures and religions and how they apply to life in modern times.

I've had a very sheltered life. What can happen to you if you stay home writing all day?

To me, movies and music go hand in hand. When I'm writing a script, one of the first things I do is find the music I'm going to play for the opening sequence.

Each book is, in a sense, an argument with myself, and I would write it, whether it is ever published or not.

A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns.

Performing is the easiest part of what I do, and songwriting is the hardest.

We need to remember that we are all created creative and can invent new scenarios as frequently as they are needed.

Learn about writing from reading. That is the right way to do it.

Symbols give us our identity, our self image, our way of explaining ourselves to ourselves and to others. Symbols in turn determine the kinds of stories we tell, and the stories we tell determine the kind of history we make and remake.

I want to write such things as compel the admiring acclamation of the world at large, such things as are written but once in years, things subtle but distinctly different from the books written every day.

To walk quietly until the miracle in everything speaks is poetry, whether we write it down or not.

I can write anything and just put it in a zine, and then it's out there. It is like blogging but on paper. It is what I started to do before the computers were all popular.

Conscious writing can be the death of poetry.

The master said you must write what you see / But what I see does not move me / The master answered Change what you see.

I think every writer's had the experience of having a really good idea, waiting to write it, and then once you write it, you're like, "Oh I kind of got past the sell by date on this." I'm not connected to the initial spark that was the idea. A lot of that's about staying open.

For me, being a writer was never a choice. I was born one. All through my childhood I wrote short stories and stuffed them in drawers. I wrote on everything. I didn't do my homework so I could write

The Indian diaspora is a wonderful place to write from and I am lucky to be part of it.

I'm talking to you and it's basically a direct communication, whereas if I'm writing a letter to you and you read the letter, there are like 12 extra deconstruction and reconstruction steps in the communication.