Writing Quotes - Page 269

History is the torch that is meant to illuminate the past, to guard us against the repetition of our mistakes of other days. We cannot join in the rewriting of history to make it conform to our comfort and convenience.

I write as if to save somebody’s life. Probably my own. Life is a kind of madness that death makes. Long live the dead because we live in them.

The essays are different because ultimately it's things I'm interested in, and I'm really just writing about myself and using those subjects as a prism.

I do think it is important to look at the writing as a job though and to commit to it like you'd have to commit to a regular nine-to-five.

The best advice on writing I've ever received was from William Zinsser: 'Be grateful for every word you can cut.'

There are Harvard grads, free thinkers, feminists, abolitionists, well-to-do people who want to go write poetry and live on a farm and cook and laugh and have a good time. As they themselves described it, it was an "inward facing" community. They were focusing on making a better existence for themselves, which I think is also the driving force of 20th century communalism in the US, the thought being that the world is corrupt, and we're going to build this little garden of innocence.

If Mad Men had taken place in the '90s it would have been just as believable. But the fact is that was the perfect storm and with the fashion and the sets and the writing and the actors it just all made sense and it just was one of those things that you can't explain.

In a good play, everyone is in the right.

My job in space will be to observe and write a journal. I am also going to be teaching a class for students on earth about life in space and on the space shuttle and conducting experiments.

I've always thought of the book as a visual art form, and it should represent a single artistic idea, which it does if you write your own material.

We have our own system, ... and journalists in our system are not put in prison for embarrassing the government by revealing things the government might not wish to have revealed. The important thing is that our system, under which journalists can write without fear or favor, should continue.

I would still give my left ball to write anything as good as OK Computer.

Writing can be bad and still be part of something good. That 'art' is really 'artifact,' Exhibit A, Exhibit B, of something else: a person's whole experience and life. And that always there's the chance that this will fail. That things will not work out.

I could not stop talking because now I had started my story, it wanted to be finished. We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us.

People think that writing is writing, but actually writing is editing. Otherwise, you're just taking notes

If you don't like someone's story, write your own. If you don't like what somebody says, say what it is you don't like.

I didn't want to be apologetic about my love story, and I think to be willing to write about love you have to be willing to sound foolish. I wanted to write about foolish and goofy love and different relationships. I wanted to write about interracial relationships in a way that does not pretend as if race does not exist.

Write like a motherfucker.

I write to find what I have to say. I edit to figure out how to say it right.

If you text 'I love you' and the person writes back an emoji - no matter what that emoji is, they don't love you back.

I'm just going to write because I cannot help it.

I didn't like school. I was pretty much daydreaming all the time. I would be in the back of the class writing down random stories and stuff that would have nothing to do with school. I only lasted two years in high school before I moved out to L.A.

Writing is a journey into the unknown.

Most established novelists are writing books informed by experiences gained in their youth. Middle age is not the best time to be changing smartphones every six months or adopting new technology platforms - because we tend to get slower and less accommodating to change as we age.

I think anybody who is writing finds he puts a little bit of himself in all of the characters, at least in this kind of a strip. It's the only way that you can survive when you have to do something every day. You have to put yourself, all of your thoughts, all of your observations and everything you know into the strip.