Writing Quotes - Page 1045

I wish there were some photographic process by which one's mind could be struck off and transferred to that of the friend we wish to know it, without the medium of this confounded letter-writing!

I can always write. Sometimes, to be sure, what I write is crap, but it's words on the page and therefore it is something to work with.

When I write a word in English, a simple one, such as, say, 'chief,' I have unwittingly ushered a querulous horde into the room. The Roman legionary is there, shaking his 'cap,' or head, and Al Cap is there, slouching in his signature working man's headgear.

While I love to read contemporary fiction, I'm not drawn to writing it. Perhaps it's because the former journalist in me is too inhibited by the press of reality; when I think about writing of my own time I always think about nonfiction narratives. Or perhaps it's just that I find the present too confounding.

I was a news reporter for 16 years, seven of them a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. Perhaps the most useful equipment I acquired in that time is a lack of preciousness about the act of writing. A reporter must write. There must be a story. The 'mot juste' unarriving? Tell that to your desk.

When you're writing non-fiction, you go as far as you can go, and then ethically you have to stop. You can't go. You can't suppose. You can't imagine. And I think there's something in human nature that wants to finish the story.

You can't write about the past and ignore religion. It was such a fundamental, mind-shaping, driving force for pre-modern societies. I'm very interested in what religion does to us - its capacity to create love and empathy or hatred and violence.

Because I worked as a newspaper reporter for about 14 years before attempting my first novel, I learned to write under almost any circumstances- by candle light, in longhand, in African villages where there was no power, under shelling in Kurdistan.

I've changed over my writing life. If I can generalize, I would say that the more recent poems - believe it or not - are more pointedly political; although, if the earlier poems were more existential, they were still political; though, in their own way, had a complicated presence.

The cave is a dark, shadowy place. It's a place that's very close and yet distant at the same time, and it's a place of revelation and isolation. Your form, your body, your writing is your confinement.

No man living in a world as interesting as this ever writes a book if he can help it.

I am through generalizing about ideas apart from men who generate them. I am through writing books about the dead, or writing books about the living to the unborn (tucked away as Literature) or writing books about the unborn to the living (whiffed away as prophecy). I put up my life on advertising the living to the living, on making men of genius known to the people and interpreted to their time, that the time in which I live, may live face to face with its men of vision and that they may live face to face with one another.

Theirs is an American tragedy in which we all have played a part. It could go on and on, or someone must write "The End" to it. I have concluded that only I can do that. And if I can, I must.

Writing, not dancing, is the chosen form of expression of the white man.

One thing I don't think that we have enough of in wine writing is the use of cause and effect. Whatever wine tastes like, whatever you're going to do with it, it is as it is for a reason.

Writing is a conversation, to me. The best kind. You can't get interrupted.

I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower, you hung all your associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see—and I don't.

It's easy to get into an easy routine but the problem with that is you can tend to write the same song over and over again.

To write well is to think well, to feel well, and to render well; it is to possess at once intellect, soul, and taste.

When writing of oneself one should show no mercy. Yet why at the first attempt to discover one's own truth does all inner strength seem to melt away in floods of self-pity and tenderness and rising tears?

Invariably, it is this for which I write: the joy ... of an argument firmly made, like a nail straightly driven, its head flush to the plank.

Semicolons . . . signal, rather than shout, a relationship. . . . A semicolon is a compliment from the writer to the reader. It says: "I don't have to draw you a picture; a hint will do."

When you're writing about something that happened, it helps you transition to the present. Ironically enough, by focusing on your presidency, it helps you realize that you're no longer the president. By reliving moments, it helps you stay focused on the moment.

When you're writing about something that happened, it helps you transition to the present.

We expect the states to show us whether or not we're achieving simple objectives-like literacy, literacy in math, the ability to read and write.