Writing Quotes - Page 1068

The best songs I write in 20 minutes.

I'll always be making music. I'd like to do it my whole life - although I also love words and want to write short stories. But right now, my songs are kind of my short stories.

When I write a song, it's all about the riff - the riff first, then the words come later.

Rock stars wanting to write is even worse than wanting to act in movies, right?

When people write lies about you, and you know that they are lies, that means that they don't know the truth, so that's OK with me. If something true came out, I would have to check my circle to see who's talking and possibly make an apology phone call to my parents!

I wish writing was a talent that I had. I've tried. Unfortunately, I'm just not talented in the writing department. But, if I was, I would just write complicated roles for women because there's a lack of them.

When people write lies about you, and you know that they are lies, that means that they don't know the truth.

Solitude causes us to write because it causes us to think.

The poet cannot invent new words every time, of course. He uses the words of the tribe. But the handling of the word, the accent, a new articulation, renew them.

The information that was contained in a cathedral was based upon a common culture - a common Christian culture - and the elements were chosen for a common symbolic meaning. Someone who knew everything that was represented in a cathedral had a sort of encyclopedia - you can indeed call it that - but it was a selective encyclopedia, like encyclopedias back when they were books and the people writing them were supposed to be specialists in their field. I think today the problem is that people don't know how to choose between different kinds of information.

I don't like things to be overcharged, because otherwise everyone starts getting nervous. I try to be very well organized. When I write the script, everything is already in there, like the decoupage.

Every story teaches me how to write it. Unfortunately, it doesn't teach me how to write the next one.

What we know about writing the novel is the novel.

When I read, I hear what's on the page. I don't know whose voice it is, but some voice is reading to me, and when I write my own stories, I hear it, too.

At the time of writing, I don't write for my friends or myself either; I write for it, for the pleasure of it.

Every story teaches you how to write that story but not the next story.

My own words, when I am at work on a story, I hear too as they go, in the same voice that I hear when I read in books. When I write and the sound of it comes back to my ears, then I act to make changes. I have always trusted this voice.

Both reading and writing are experiences--lifelong-- in the course of which we who encounter words used in certain ways are persuaded by them to be brought mind and heart within the presence, the power, of the imagination.

Dialogue has to show not only something about the speaker that is its own revelation, but also maybe something about the speaker that he doesn't know but the other character does know.

There's still a strange moment with every book when I move from the position of writer to the position of reader and I suddenly see my words with the eyes of the cold public. It gives me a terrible sense of exposure, as if I'd gotten sunburned.

Once you're into a story everything seems to apply-what you overhear on a city bus is exactly what your character would say on the page you're writing. Wherever you go, you meet part of your story.

Daydreaming had started me on the way; but story writing once I was truly in its grip, took me and shook me awake.

What I do in the writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart and skin of a human being who is not myself. It is the act of a writer's imagination that I set the most high.

Good genre movies are a little bit like trying to write a haiku. There are certain things that you have to do to fulfill the audience's expectations, but inside that, you have complete freedom to talk about whatever you want. Who wants to see a movie about gun violence in America and class? But, if you set it in this terrifying, fun, roller coaster ride of a movie, you can talk about whatever you want. That's been the game that genre movies play, when they do it well.

The writing process was some of the most exciting and rewarding moments of my life. It felt a lot like being in a band.