Writing Quotes - Page 1066

Honestly, when you're writing you try to stay on the story, on the character's mind, trying to throw stuff at them. There is danger, and the scares have to kick in the right places with the drama. And you try not to do too much to try to create those moments. Those moments create themselves.

As a storyteller, when you're writing a movie and when you're directing, you want to keep people entertained. That's the whole point, right? It has to be entertaining.

I know that I'm a real writer because sometimes I write a story just because I want to; not because someone's told me to.

one learns best, and writes best, in a state of defiance.

Writers were never meant to be professionals. Writing is not a profession, it is an activity, an essentially amateur occupation. It is what you do when you are not living.

Writing is more than just the making of a series of comprehensible statements: it is the gathering in of connotations; the harvesting of them, like blackberries in a good season, ripe and heavy, snatched from among the thorns of logic.

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

Confidence is something one acquires. It can come early or late but it is impossible to write without it. Mine came late.

Writing is an act of generosity toward other people.

Style is what's there when you look at someone's writing and you know that they wrote it and nobody else did.

I always listen to music when I write, I need a rhythm to write.

I always loved rapping ever since Snoop said "1-2-3-4," I was repeating lines, but I didn't start writing my own lyrics until I was twelve.

There are so many ready to write (poor fools!) for the honor and glory of the thing, and there are so many ready to take advantage of this fact, and withhold from needy talent the moral right to a deserved remuneration.

To Nobody, then, will I write my Journal! since to Nobody can I be wholly unreserved, to Nobody can I reveal every thought, every wish of my heart, with the most unlimited confidence, the most unremitting sincerity, to the end of my life!

But authors before they write should read.

But suppose, asks the student of the professor, we follow all your structural rules for writing, what about that something else that brings the book alive? What is the formula for that? The formula for that is not included in the curriculum.

There is no adequate definition for creative writing, any more than it is possible to describe pain or flavor or color.

I know this much: if you gotta write, honey, you gotta write. Some call it a disease, some a madness. Ah, but I call it love.

Back to work. If I’m [writing] I’m not thinking about the crazy.

I you're writing memoir, but it even comes up in fiction. People just assume that you're writing thinly veiled autobiography. And particularly, I think, for people of color, our work is always seen as kind of anthropological artifact regardless. So, there's always going to be that assumption, but even more so in a memoir because often the names aren't even changed. It is easier to verify.

A virtuoso performance. Scott Thompson’s biography of the soldier statesman Fidel V. Ramos illustrates the fascinating and complex geography of Filipino politics and its relation with the American hegemon. It’s first-rate scholarship and equally first-rate writing.

A writer wastes nothing.

Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meagre.

If you try to create a type, you may end with nothing. If you do a good job of creating an individual, you may succeed at creating a type.

The history of my life is the history of the struggle between an overwhelming urge to write and a combination of circumstances bent on keeping me from it.