Best 30386 quotes in «writing quotes» category

I suppose that there are endeavors in which self-confidence is even more important than it is in writing -- tightrope walking comes immediately to mind -- but it's difficult for me to think of anybody producing much writing if his confidence is completely shot.

I suppose, the natural outgrowth about writing about two friends, it becomes about their friendship, and the complexities of it, and the way personality plays off each other, and what they each like to do, separately and together.

I suppose there must be idiots who dream of signing deals with publishers while fully intending to drink martinis in cool bars or ride around on skateboards. But the actual writers I know are experts in neurotic self-torture. Every page of writing is the result of a thousand tiny decisions and desperate acts of will.

I suppose we think euphemistically that all writers write because they have something to say that is truthful and honest and pointed and important. And I suppose I subscribe to that, too. But God knows when I look back over thirty years of professional writing, I'm hard-pressed to come up with anything that's important. Some things are literate, some things are interesting, some things are classy, but very damn little is important.

I suspect by the time the Beatles were writing the White Album, they didn't go, "'I Wanna Hold Your Hand!' I wanna play that!" It's like if somebody asked you to put on the clothes you wore in high school. Well, no. No!

I suppress in my prose any language which calls attention to itself.

I suspect that every writer is secretly writing for someone.

I suspect that writer's block afflicts mainly people who have some stable and ample source of income outside of writing. So far it hasn't been a problem.

I suspect that music has qualities both of speech and writing - partly built in, partly individually constructed - and this goes on all through one's life.

I take almost no notes when I write. I have one notebook - this old green leather notebook that my dad gave me a decade ago.

I take in a lot of stuff from real life, movies, television, news and it all gets mixed in my head and somehow turns into a story idea.

I swear I could write a book about all the things no one has ever thanked me for.

It actually took me 20 years to want to write about my youth. I was definitely always a little intimidated about writing about that part of my life.

I take editing seriously. It's a joy to edit. I always hand a manuscript to several editors and can't wait to get back their notes and see what they've said. I don't criticize myself for making blunders here and there, because it's just natural. You write in chunks, and you may not remember that that sentence you wrote yesterday had the same word repeated three times. I do enjoy that. I love the feeling of repairing. Repairing is really nice.

I swear I have at least one good song idea a day. But if I don't get pen to paper in ten seconds, it's gone forever.

Is your sales call so valuable that your client would write a check for your visit?

I take mentoring very seriously and I am on the board of an organization called Girls Write Now, where we match teen girls and writing mentors because it changes their lives.

I take pens and I write on the inside of my arm. When I'm with people and somebody says a really fascinating anecdote, or fact, or phrase, I'll write it on the inside of my arm. At the end of the day, I'll take the very best things that are on my arm and I'll copy them into a notebook that I always carry and only when the weather is absolutely terrible will I really key the very best of that notebook into the computer. At that point, it's all sort of censored twice - only the best things go from the arm to the book and only the best things go from the book to the computer.

I take my spoken-word stuff extremely seriously because I feel like that's true writing, true lyricism.

I talk to my readers on social networking sites, but I never tell them what the book is about. Writing is lonely, so from time to time I talk to them on the Internet. It's like chatting at a bar without leaving your office. I talk with them about a lot of things other than my books.

I talk to myself on paper about my characters - sometimes writing in first person... I keep lists of unanswered questions that I can always turn to in order to get myself going.

I take something that happened to me in 1983, and I make it happen to somebody else in 1943. I pick my life apart that way, try to understand it better by writing straight through it.

I take things a little bit more critically now, like, "What did I think I was saying in that song? What is this song about?" I thought the lyrics were incredibly descriptive, and now they sound really cryptic and weird. I'd like to also think that when I listen to songs from Something About Airplanes that I'm proud of my development as a writer. I don't think I was doing anything poorly at that time, but I can certainly see how my writing has changed.

I talk about it a lot to my students. Musicality never came up in any of own writing education, and I can see why - we don't have the vocabulary for it. Phrasing is intuitive, and its difficult to articulate when it's on and when it's not.

I talk about myself. That's what I am. I'm a blogger. I have always decided that I was going to be an expert on one thing, and I am an expert on this person, and so I write about it.

I take six or seven years to write really small books. There is a kind of aesthetic of leanness, of brevity.

Italian is a very different poetic situation and there are these hard and fast rhythmic periods, settenari, ottonari of seven and eight syllables. These are fundamental to the way people speak and write and breaking them is more radical in Italian than when we break a line. I'm sure there are Italian poets who want to write poetry as prose and break these Petrarchan rules. And breaking them is fun and a valid thing to do. But I'm more interested in trying to write poetry that absorbs tradition and uses it in new ways, and doesn't throw it out.

I talk to my typewriter and that is what I've been working on for 40 years-how to write for talking.

It all adds up; never discount your efforts, because small efforts build big things. One word doesn't make a novel, but one word does begin a novel, and from that small beginning everything else follows. Even if it's just 'The', write something on that blank page.

I talk about folding it in often with Althea, my girlfriend. She's getting her doctoral degree at Berkeley and she talks about how even when writing these very academic, and, for the most part, serious papers there's just so much going on in her head and heart, and it's a reminder that there's a reason that she's studying these things.

I talked about the summer of 1985, when I worked at an amusement park on Long Island, the kind of place where someone would pull a knife on you if they wanted a better prize than you were giving them. You found a lot of used needles beside the cotton-candy cart at the end of the night. It was a pretty white-trash, scary place. It was one in a series of terrible jobs I've had, coming from not much money and having no particularly resourceful skills. And at one point one of my friends, a writer on the show, Jenny Konner, said, "You should write about that.

I talked to [Larry] Kramer a little bit about it while I was writing 'Remembering Denny' . Denny was one of those people who took a long time to come out.

It all depends on what I'm working on and if there is a deadline involved. Anything that's headed toward a magazine or newspaper is hacked out on the computer; that's a matter of efficiency. I write longer pieces of prose on a typewriter because the act of retyping it for the computer is a useful tactic for revision. Poems tend to be written longhand.

It all has to do with art - writing, painting, things I’ve done for a long time but just never had enough time to pursue. I have poetry - things that are designed for songs, but they’re always poems first.

It always seems to me that one of the saddest things about the death of a literary man is the fact that the breaking-up of his collection of books almost invariably follows; the building up of a good library, the work of a lifetime, has been so much labour lost, so far as future generations are concerned. Talent, yes, and genius too, are displayed not only in writing books but also in buying them, and it is a pity that the ruthless hammer of the auctioneer should render so much energy and skill fruitless.

I taught elementary school and painted apartments for ten years. Now I write full-time and never have to change a thing I write. Every book comes to me in a flash of inspiration and takes me about two seconds to finish. The longer books, like the Time Warp Trio novels, take a little longer to write - more like four seconds.

I taught high school English for 24 years. I always teach my students to appreciate the beauty of language and to write poetically.

It appeared that after first contemplating a book on some subject, and after giving serious preliminary attention to it, I needed a period of subconscious incubation which could not be hurried and was if anything impeded by deliberate thinking.... Having, by a time of very intense concentration, planted the problem in my subconsciousness, it would germinate underground until, suddenly, the solution emerged with a blinding clarity, so that it only remained to write down what happened as if in a revelation.

I taught everyone a very bad lesson at my publisher because they actually gave me deadlines this time and I'm now meeting them. I used to say, "Here's my book; it's six years late." I'm so much faster now, and work differently. With all the years of writing, I think I still draft as obsessively, but I think back to writing. On your first story, you start at draft one. On your second story, you start at draft ten. On your third story, you start at draft one hundred. If you need a hundred and eight drafts, you may write eight instead of a hundred and eight.

It always seems to someone outside the business that it is very difficult to write for a comedy show because it must be done quickly. Actually, it is much easier to write this humor than to do a joke or a show from scratch, because the audience knows the plot. Just mention what is going on and then deliver the punch line.

I taught writing classes at the University of Pennsylvania for a number of years and I realized that all you can do is encourage people and give them assignments and hope they will write them.

It amazes me that you feel that each time you write a story you give away one of your dreams and you feel the poorer for it. But then you have not thought that this dream is planted in others, others begin to live it too, it is shared, it is the beginning of friendship and love. How is this world made which you enjoy, the friends around me that you love? They came because I first gave away my stories.

... it appears to me that problems, inherent in any writing, loom unduly large when one looks ahead. Though nothing is easy, little is quite impossible.

I taught myself to write in order to understand who I was and so yes, writing was an act of self-actualization in the beginning.

I taught writing for a while and whenever somebody would tell me they were going to write about their dad, I would tell them they might as well go write about killing puppies because neither story was going to work. It just doesn't work.

It always bothers me to see people writing RIP when a person dies. It just feels so insincere and like a cop out. To me, RIP is the microwave dinner of posthumous honours.

It bothers me when people, say, you know, write for, you know, a web publication and get paid little or nothing or, you know, expecting to, like, read the best newspapers in the world and not pay a cent for it. Those newspapers need money in order to operate.

It can be really powerful to write something when youre sad.

It came about as follows: over the years when I was involved in dianetics, I wrote the beginnings of many stories. I would get an idea, and then write the beginning, and then never touch it again.

It can take years. With the first draft, I just write everything. With the second draft, it becomes so depressing for me, because I realize that I was fooled into thinking I'd written the story. I hadn't-I had just typed for a long time. So then I have to carve out a story from the 25 or so pages. It's in there somewhere-but I have to find it. I'll then write a third, fourth, and fifth draft, and so on.