Writing Quotes - Page 1096

You cannot see what I see because you see what you see. You cannot know what I know because you know what you know. What I see and what I know cannot be added to what you see and what you know because they are not of the same kind. Neither can it replace what you see and what you know, because that would be to replace you yourself." "Hang on, can I write this down?" said Arthur, excitedly fumbling in his pocket for a pencil.

Many words and expressions which only a matter of decades ago were considered so distastefully explicit that, were they merely to be breathed in public, the perpetrator would be shunned, barred from polite society, and in extreme cases shot through the lungs, are now thought to be very healthy and proper, and their use in everyday speech and writing is evidence of a well-adjusted, relaxed and totally un****ed-up personality.

I think the idea of art kills creativity.

I love to keep poking and prodding at it. I’ve thought about it so much over the years that that fascination is bound to spill over into my writing.

Douglas Adams did not enjoy writing, and he enjoyed it less as time went on. He was a bestselling, acclaimed, and much-loved novelist who had not set out to be a novelist, and who took little joy in the process of crafting novels. He loved talking to audiences. He liked writing screenplays. He liked being at the cutting edge of technology and inventing

I am fascinated by religion. (That's a completely different thing from believing in it!) It has had such an incalculably huge effect on human affairs. What is it? What does it represent? Why have we invented it? How does it keep going? What will become of it? I love to keep poking and prodding at it. I've thought about it so much over the years that that fascination is bound to spill over into my writing.

The more I think about our species the more I think we just do stuff and make up explanations later when asked. But it's not true that I would rather write than read. I would rather read than write. To be honest I would rather hang upside down in a bucket than write.

It takes an awful lot of time to not write a book.

The books people are writing today, they're too long. You get a little bit of plot, and then pages and pages of Creative Writing. They teach classes in how to do this. They should teach classes in how to stop!

I'm always writing a new book even when books are being shopped around, and none of my books has been published in the order that they have been written.

As a gay writer and someone who began by writing autobiographical fiction, it's hard to get away from chatter of "You're just a narcissist," "You're just a gay man," "You're just looking for yourself in somebody else," "Why does your boyfriend look like you," a kind of baggage that you already have to create in the face of.

William Faulkner was the master of what one must do to be serious. But I don't understand why people haven't moved forward from that, why that's not where the line in the sand is that you would see from. When I think about the reception of my own writing and what seems "difficult," there is an actual precedent.

I can start with the idea of taking until you can take off, through the idea that all of my writing foregrounds the idea of how I'm taking from my own life. I'm stealing from my own life in a way, and from the people around me, but in service of getting somewhere else. I'm starting with an autobiographical impulse, to get a better vantage on the circumstances of the life that I happen to be in at the moment and how that life connects to others.

I think Stephen Crane too becomes trapped in a myth that poetry should be operating at a certain level, that there's the real world and the reflection of that real world. I don't exist in any of these historical periods. I exist in the period in which I'm writing the book. So I only attempt to frame this in a way that I myself relate to.

I'm writing as I'm reading. I'm constantly already engaged in dialogue with the critics. None of these are my ideas solely. They are my form of entering into a dialogue with ideas that are already out there, and calibrating how much sense these make to me or not. I want to be responsible to the work that has already been done.

Often I'll find clues to where the story might go by figuring out where the characters would rather not go.

I just write songs, I make music, and I have several times over reinvented my life in order to keep making music and just make music all day. I don't know. It's just what I have to do.

I have always had to write songs. As a lifestyle and as a business model, it's pretty difficult. Largely at this point I'm so deep in. I have a lot of skills in this particular world, but it just feels compulsive.

You can find truly original pieces of writing, but they're original because you go, "Who would have even have thought of that?," or, "Why would anyone ever want to go see that?"

Obviously, you take the risk to step over the line any time you do something where comedians interact with each other. Like a roast, somebody's always going to cross over the line. As far as the public goes, I like feedback, I like to hear laughter, and I like the occasional pointed heckle, but it's true: Everybody thinks that they need to express their opinion now. There's been this sea change where people are constantly writing to me directly about stuff, where in the past you'd never hear about it, because nobody would try to find you to make one of their stupid comments.

What I remove from my writing is linear context. It's not really important to me, because it doesn't give me chills to see, "you flip the latch and the lock opens and then you can open the top of the chest and inside the chest is this." That doesn't give me chills, to think in that vein. So I've always kind of avoided it.

I've been writing a lot about just the aspects of luck and being picked, and how of course it's always how one perceives themselves in the world, as a bit of a scapegoat or a bit of a hero. Everyone generally has about a 60/40 split that volleys, between those two.

Sure, you make money writing on the coast ... but that money is like so much compressed snow. It goes so fast it melts in your hand.

What writes worse than a Theodore Dreiser? ... Two Theodore Dreisers.

Despite his persecutions, Mr. [Upton] Sinclair reveals himself in Money Writes! to be an enviable man. Always the thing he desires to believe is the thing he feels he knows to be true.