Writing Quotes - Page 266

The more you write tunes, the better they will become. The more you do gigs, the better you will become. It’s just kind of like the facts of life; the practice makes perfect thing. Keep your fingers crossed, start from the bottom and work your way up.

Good traders trade. Good letter writers write letters.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

The historian records, but the novelist creates.

Of course, it may be that the arts of writing and photography are antithetical. The hope and aim of a word-handler is that he maycommunicate a thought or an impression to his reader without the reader's realizing that he has been dragged through a series of hazardous or grotesque syntactical situations. In photography the goal seems to be to prove beyond a doubt that the cameraman, in his great moment of creation, was either hanging by his heels from the rafters or was wedged under the floor with his lens in a knothole.

There is nothing harder to estimate than a writer's time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments—moments of sustained creation—when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a writer's time isn't worth the paper he is not writing anything on.

The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest.

All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.

I hold a beast, an angel, and a madman in me, and my enquiry is as to their working, and my problem is their subjugation and victory, down throw and upheaval, and my effort is their self-expression.

Most actors are starving. Most of us are walking around with a flashlight and tweezers looking for evidence. When you have someone that actually writes an acting role, it's rare.

I'm not Akira Kurosawa. He used to write...He used to write a completely new spec script over a couple of nights. I'm not like that. It takes me a long time to put a film together that I want to make.

I like any and all of my associations with music: writing, playing, and listening. We write and play from our perspective, and the audience listens from its perspective. If and when we agree, I am lucky.

The real hero of programming is the one who writes negative code.

You do bits and you fake anger and you write a bit and you have passion for it. Then you do it too many times and you have to work up the anger... and I've never had to do that with Dr. Drew Pintsky. Dr. Drew is to medicine what David Blaine is to science.

If someone's going to talk about me, I'd want it to be positively. The way many write, you'd think only bad things were interesting. If we don't think positive, what's the use? It's a lot more fun, you know.

Writing calls on unused muscles and involves solitude and immobility.

Hitch your unconscious mind to your writing arm.

You only learn to be a better writer by actually writing.

You have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.

As much fun as it is to read a book, writing a book is one level deeper than that.

In language that is searing and lyrical, evocative and precise, this exceptional book thinks with the zombies, specters, felons, slaves, dogs, cadavers, and other entities that are the remnants of loss and dispossession in the law. Dogs and people are abundantly present here, even as the legal fictions they are made to inhabit are exposed with acid lucidity. These are hard histories made readable by Dayan's precious acts of writing.

Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals. Preferably big ones.

I love writing books - I really do. If I could just quit everything and work on a book every day, I would love that most.

Work is style, and there is style without thought; not in theory, only in fact. When I take a sentence in my hand, raise it to the light, rub my hand across it, disjoin it, put it back together again with a comma added, raising the pitch in the front part; when I rub the grain of it, comb the fur of it, re-assemble the bones of it, I am making something that carries with it the sound of a voice, the firmness of a hand. Maybe little more.

Melodies can be good depending on the context. You can have a simple melody, and if the harmony behind it is interesting, it can make a very simple melody really different. You can also have a complex melody. The more complex it is, the harder it is to sing, and then sometimes it can sound contrived. You could write a melody that would be fine on a saxophone but if you give it to a singer, it can sound raunchy.