Writing Quotes - Page 274

In writing, as in medicine, there are no short cuts. You need stamina.

Writing is my love. If you love something, you find a lot of time. I write for two hours a day, usually starting at midnight; at times, I start at 11.

I'm pretty terrible at writing, so the way I kind of therapeutically get through things is by drawing.

The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.

The way I write is that I'll actually have a conversation out loud with myself. In a weird way, I just kind of get schizophrenic and play two characters.

I tend to get lonely a lot. That is probably why I try to write about different things when I am alone. I feel that it is a good time to organize in various ways and I should often try something new with patience.

To write about a struggle amidst the struggling: one must hope that the muddling will end someday.

I wonder what the retirement age is in the novel business. The day you die.

I always wrote. I've written stories since I was 9. We didn't have a computer at home, but my aunt Magda had one. Whenever I'd go to her place, I was in the basement working on her computer, writing stories.

After many months of writing, it occured to me that it might be possible to photograph, in the flesh, what I was attempting to capture in words. I bought a Rolleiflex camera and began to take pictures of objects or structures that were used and abused by human hands

All you can write is what you see.

My gift was in comedy. I found out I could make jokes. I could tell jokes. I could write them. So over the years, that's what I've done.

It's a wonderful thing to be able to create your own world whenever you want to.

[Stanley] Kubrick was a great artist and a perfectionist. He always wanted the exact right thing. He did a million takes. Everything had to be perfect. I'm an imperfectionist. I don't really care that much about the work. I write quickly. I'm careless. I shoot carelessly.

Writing a long and substantial book is like having a friend and companion at your side, to whom you can always turn for comfort and amusement, and whose society becomes more attractive as a new and widening field of interest is lighted in the mind.

I started writing cheating songs when I was too young to have any idea what I was writing about - broken hearts and things like that. I just think it was something I already knew, something I had experienced in another lifetime.

To defend what you've written is a sign that you are alive.

The only way to learn to write is to force yourself to produce a certain number of words on a regular basis.

For a person whose sole burning ambition is to write - like myself - college is useless beyond the Sophomore year.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

From the writer's point of view, critics should be ignored, although it's hard not to do what they suggest. I think it's unfortunate to have critics for friends. Suppose you write something that stinks, what are they going to say in a review? Say it stinks? So if they're honest, they do, and if you were friends you're still friends, but the knowledge of your lousy writing and their articulate admission of it will be always something between the two of you, like the knowledge between a man and his wife of some shady adultery.

What you have to do as a writer is . . . write day in and day out no matter what happens.

Acting is easier - writing is more creative. The lazy man vies with the industrious.

I once did hold it, as our statists do, A baseness to write fair, and labour'd much How to forget that learning; but, sir, now It did me yeoman's service.

Never durst poet touch a pen to write Until his ink were temper'd with Love's sighs.