Writing Quotes - Page 1023

My writing is inspired by just about everything, yet I am unaware of so much of the process.

I'm focusing on writing the best story I can write. Which means I'm doing everything I can to give the artist within me as much power as possible.

I've always felt alienated. I realized that I've been terrified my entire life. So I can identify that fear which drives so many of the people that I write about.

I have rituals for cleaning out resentments, disappointments, heartbreak, depression and for work. One of the things I do is go over old stuff if I have been unable to write for a while.

The meaning ... of a writer will be found not just in what he intends to say, or what he does literally say, but in the effect of his writing on living beings.

I look at the film without any music or sound. I try to grasp the story from the screenplay. I try to write to the novel or book if there is one. I try to create music that's honest and true to my heart for the story.

By the time you get a job, you know how to behave in a meeting or how to write a simple memo.

It's kind of astonishing that people trust strangers because of words they write on computer screens.

I think it's fine for a singer to sing someone else's song. But the thing I don't like is when a singer that can write songs starts getting someone else to do it for them.

When you're writing a novel, you're still telling a story. But you're telling it very differently. It's a craft like anything else.

Traditionally, people have been adapting novels and short stories forever. Now, they're doing it simultaneously, with an eye towards writing the movie before the novel has even come out or been finished. It's a function of this hyper-accelerated society we live in, where everyone is trying to short circuit the process.

I've always wanted to write a novel. It's overwhelming and daunting, and it's one of those things that every writer fantasizes about doing.

Distinguish between the work and the job title. When I was leaving school in the early 1970s, many people wanted to be journalists, carrying out investigative reporting for print newspapers. Print newspapers may not exist in twenty years. But good thinking and good writing about issues that need to be reported and investigated will always be needed; but where this happens, what it is called, and who pays for it may be quite different than could have been envisioned by the great journalists of the past.

The songs are all indexes of a time in the past when I was writing them.

I didn't sit down and write a song like, "I want to write a song about this," but I just spent so much time living in this affectively charged space of the live show, with its risks and the incredible reward that comes from people knowing me, recognizing me, affirming me. And then I would wake up in the morning and have an eight-hour drive where I would read George Saunders and listen to Grouper and Pure X. And you bond so much with your tour-mates and your bandmates because it's this weird, quite desperate way of living.

Writing is the thing that props me up.

What I have written-and how I came to write it-is most powerfully what I am.

Ponder, your comedies are woeful chaff: Write tragedies, when you would make us laugh.

I am persuaded that foolish writers and foolish readers are created for each other; and that fortune provides readers as she does mates for ugly women.

Ye who write, choose a subject suited to your abilities. [Lat., Sumite materiam vestris, qui scribitis, aequam Viribus.]

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Of writing well the source and fountainhead is wise thinking.

The man is either crazy or he is a poet.

I carry my iPod everywhere. My favorite group is the John Butler Trio, an Australian jam band. The lead singer and guitarist writes amazing lyrics.

This sounds like a cliche, but I always wanted to write. After college, I did some writing and realized very quickly that it's hard to make a living as a writer. At that point, I was more interested in fiction writing.