Best 30386 quotes in «writing quotes» category

The peculiarity of all death-based religions is that their subject-matter is entirely outside of facts. Men could think and think, talk and argue, advance, deny, assert, and controversy, and write innumerable books, without being hampered at any time by any fact.

The peculiar need to write is increased, it seems, rather than allayed with practice.

The pen is a formidable weapon, but a man can kill himself with it a great deal more easily than he can other people.

The pen is the language of the soul; as the concepts that in it are generated, such will be its writings.

The pen is the tongue of the soul; as are the thoughts engendered there, so will be the things written.

The pens which write against disarmament are made with the same steel from which guns are made.

The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again. There is no way to be sure of any this.

The penalty of greatness is to write autographs.

The pen is an instrument of discovery rather than just a recording implement. If you write a letter of resignation or something with an agenda, you're simply using a pen to record what you have thought out.

The PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award is a way of spotlighting individual cases. If you look at the history of the award, the freedom rate is very high: a very high percentage of people who receive those awards are freed in the next six months to a year. The only weapon there is attention, but interestingly it works.

The people around you are you. They share your history. They can even write it with you. And when you lose one, there's no doubt you lose some of yourself, however they're lost.

The people at the record company had asked me if I could write a song about my life, my relationship with God, and where I'm from. Well, I can't write a song on purpose, my songs come in a moment of inspiration or desperation.

The people who encouraged me weren't necessarily writers or readers themselves. They were people who were just pleased to see me devote my life to reading and writing.

The people who are making money are the ones who are writing and singing their own songs.

The people who review my books, generally, are kind of youngish culture writers who aspire to write books, or write opinion pieces about what they think of Neil Young, or why they quit watching ER or whatever. And because of that, I think there's a lot of people who write about my books with the premise of, "Why this guy? Why not me?

The people who review my books, generally, are kind of youngish culture writers who aspire to write books. When someone writes a book review, they obviously already self-identify as a writer. I mean, they are. They're writers, they're critics, and they're writing about a book about a writer who's a critic. So I think it's really hard for people to distance themselves from what they're criticizing.

The perfect detective story cannot be written. The type of mind which can evolve the perfect problem is not the type of mind that can produce the artistic job of writing.

The perfect life would be to have an amazing part every year and to spend all my free time to just write.

The person I am in the company of my sisters has been entirely different from the person I am in the company of other people. Fearless, powerful, surprising, moved as I otherwise am only when I write.

The people whose necks hurt when I write about the Middle East tend to live in Brooklyn or Boca Raton: the kind of Zionist who pays another man to live in Israel for him. I have nothing but contempt for such people.

The person you are (in total, at that moment in time) is what creates the story you're writing. It's infused in every piece of punctuation, in the plot, in the most minor character who crosses the page. It's all your voice.

The philosophy of hedonism means little to lovers of pleasure. They have no inclination to read philosophy, or to write it.

The phenomenon of university creative writing programs doesn't exist in France. The whole idea is regarded as a novelty, or an oddity.

The person who writes the bank's commercials is not the person who makes the loans.

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 Piano Lesson' is very sophisticated, easily the most adult or complex material I've attempted. It's the first film I've written that has a proper story, and it was a big struggle for me to write. It meant I had to admit the power of narrative.

The pictures feel as essential to me as the text. I was always interested in including pictures with writing.

The place I write best is at the Angell Hall computer center on the University of Michigan campus, where I went to school. I still go over there and rock it through the night.

The phrase 'teen hottie' literally makes me want to throw up. I'm a pop princess at heart. Pop is about distilling what you want to say and making it easy. And the way I write isn't about making things easy. It's a weird juxtaposition.

The poet is he who can write some pure mythology today without the aid of posterity.

[The poet] must write as the interpreter of nature and the legislator of mankind, and consider himself as presiding over the thoughts and manners of future generations, as a being superior to time and place.

The play is one of the very few pieces of great dramatic and comic writing that I have read in a long, long time. I was drawn to it because of the power of the writing, which gives me the actor a chance to explore many facets of myself.

The Pleasure Seekers eventually turned into Cradle, when we started writing our own material. My younger sister Nancy was brought in as singer and I kind of stepped aside as main lead singer and concentrated on my instrument.

The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. But the real question is, 'What happens to the reader once he or she gets inside the poem?' That's the real question for me, is getting the reader into the poem and then taking the reader somewhere, because I think of poetry as a kind of form of travel writing.

The poems are part of my attempt to understand being in the world in an honest way.

The pleasure of writing fiction is that you are always spotting some new approach, an alternative way of telling a story and manipulating characters; the novel is such a wonderfully flexible form.

The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading

The poem . . . is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.

The poems I did write there [in Harvard] include Alphabets the 1984 Phi Beta Kappa poem and A Sofa in the Forties. And, of course, the John Harvard poem for the 350th anniversary Villanelle for an Anniversary.

The poet must not only write the poem but must scrutinize the world intensely, or anyway that part of the world he or she has taken for subject. If the poem is thin, it is likely so not because the poet does not know enough words, but because he or she has not stood long enough among the flowers--has not seen them in any fresh, exciting, and valid way.

The poets are the standard bearers of language. Their work lives or dies word by word. When I write and can hear a clunky sentence, I try to write up to the poetry that I have recited beforehand.

The point is the 'me' that you see before you is not the 'me' in my private little space, shape-shifting into the writing role, nor is it the 'me' that works with the actors. Here, at the end of the film doing interviews, I feel like I'm in disguise.

The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.

The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

The point of good writing is knowing when to stop.

The Polar Express was the easiest of my picture book manuscripts to write... Once I realized the train was going to the North Pole, finding the story seemed less like a creative effort than an act of recollection. I felt, like the storys narrator, that I was remembering something, not making it up.

The poet's first rule must be never to bore his readers; and his best way of keeping this rule is never to bore himself-which, of course, means to write only when he has something urgent to say.

The poet will write for his peers alone. He will remember only that he saw truth and beauty from his position, and expect the time when a vision as broad shall overlook the same field as freely.

The point is that descriptive writing is very rarely entirely accurate and during the reign of Olaf Quimby II as Patrician of Ankh-Morpork some legislation was passed in a determined attempt to ?put a stop to this sort of thing and introduce some honest.

The point of writing my name to you is that I see who you are, you see who I am... and that's what it's about.