Writing Quotes - Page 1092

At Ucross I learned that I am capable of focusing deeply for long periods of time. I love to write. I don't think I would have said that before this trip.

I feel like you just need to keep writing until the writing itself just begins to take shape.

I realized that the people I want to impress most are already in my band. If I just do my best and try to write great songs and then collaborate with these guys and try to make a great record, that's my best path to success.

Ultimately, we as a band just write what we write. Some of it's very serious, and even in the serious songs, there's sometimes an angle of levity. I think that's just how we communicate naturally and to shy away from that would be, first of all, boring for me, but also it wouldn't ring true to who I am or the way I relate to people or the way we relate to people as a band or the way we relate to the audience. Humor is a big part of it, but we also take our craft very seriously.

Readers are what it's all about, aren't they? If not, why am I writing?

Saying you're a pop group isn't saying very much. Personally, when I think of pop, I think of instant, accessible, catchy songs - I definitely identify our music as that. I think that by writing pop, or instant, accessible or hopefully catchy music, it shoes you into bigger audiences because it seems that more people like that music. I think the possibilities are endless if you stick to a simplistic short song; the music can be as wild and bizarre as you want it to be, as long as at the core of it, there's something really strong.

I was just fooling around with the piano and Todd [Phillips] was like, 'Hey there's a great spot in the movie [The Hangover] where we need a little bit of a breath in the narrative. You should write a song and stick it in there.' And I was like, 'Well, what should the song be about?' And he said, 'The tiger.' 'Oh, okay.' So I went off and I wrote this song. I came back and Todd and I tinkered with it a little more and then we shot it right then. It all happened in a day.

A lot of kind of like the way that Andy [Bernard] talks, you know, the writers pick up on those things - little moments that I inject and then they start to write it in later. It's hard to say if a whole storyline is spun out of an improv. I feel like it has happened on The Office, I just can't think of it.

I had done a couple TV pilots, and a friend of mine wanted to leave comics and come work in Hollywood, and I said, "Well, you've got to understand that when you sell a TV pilot, imagine if you turned in the best issue of Batman ever, and DC was like, 'Well we love this, but we can't publish it because we have to publish this other thing by this other person." The odds are really long on getting anything made, so if you come from comics and you're still making a living in comics, that really helps because you're not desperate for someone's permission to write for a living.

You can sit and write in your room all you want, but until other people see it, until you see it produced for television or film or something, you're not 100 percent sure if what you wrote is actually going to work.

I would like to be writing more because people are constantly asking me questions, and I write down what they are asking me.

The history of the development of contemporary writing in Vancouver from 1946 to 1960 is pretty largely a one-man show, and that man was me.

I like to write a lot of satire.

I had reached a point in my career in which I was ready to try something new in my writing, and the idea of a novel has always been in the back of my mind.

I never read prefaces, and it is not much good writing things just for people to skip. I wonder other authors have never thought of this.

The book [ A Passage to India ] shows signs of fatigue and disillusionment; but it has chapters of clear and triumphant beauty, and above all it makes us wonder, what will he write next?

The novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous - no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or Helicon, not even a Pisgah. It is most distinctly one of the moister areas of literature - irrigated by a hundred rills and occasionally degenerating into a swamp. I do not wonder that the poets despise it, though they sometimes find themselves in it by accident. And I am not surprised at the annoyance of the historians when by accident it finds itself among them.

Finish. The difference between being a writer and being a person of talent is the discipline it takes to apply the seat of your pants to the seat of your chair and finish. Don't talk about doing it. Do it. Finish.

When I visit schools and talk to students about writing, I give them one word of advice and I give it to them quickly and loudly-FINISH! Starting something is easier than finishing it. You must have discipline to go from a few sentences, to a few paragraphs, to a piece of writing that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Finishing something bridges the difference between someone who has talent and one who does not. My best advice? Apply the seat of your pants to the seat of your chair-and finish. FINISH!

I'm looking forward to getting back to my house and my Ugg boots and not washing sometimes, and getting back to writing.

I think virgins are far more interesting to write about. If we've been around the block a few times, we know what to expect. Not so with virgins.

The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

One of the things I had to learn as a writer was to trust the act of writing. To put myself in the position of writing to find out what I was writing. I did that with 'World's Fair' as with all of them. The inventions of the book come as discoveries.

One of the things I had to learn as a writer was to trust the act of writing. To put myself in the position of writing to find out what I was writing.

Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing - none of that is writing. Writing is writing. Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.