Writing Quotes - Page 281

A song that sounds simple is just not that easy to write. One of the objectives of this record was to try and write melodies that continue to resonate...Everything that happens to you influences your writing...The writing process for me is pretty much always the same-it's a solitary experience...I have yet to write that one song that defines my career...Beck said he didn't believe in the theory of a song coming through you as if you were an open vessel. I agree with him to a certain extent.

I'm a method writer. In order to write about the emotion, I have to experience it. I get physically tired and exhausted, devoting hours and hours and hours to it.

Sixty percent of all Indians live in urban areas, but nobody's writing about them. They're really an underrepresented population, and the ironic thing is very, very few of those we call Native American writers actually grew up on reservations, and yet most of their work is about reservations.

Some people can sit down and write a song, but they can't go on stage like I can.

I don't see myself as a very important person. But I was the second woman to write a novel in Iran, and I have written most of the novels about Iranian women. In this way, maybe I have a good place in Iranian literature.

The thing about writing is that if you have the impulse, you will find the time.

I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.

I usually write very few stage directions. I think a lot of that is a waste of time. The art of screenwriting is in its terseness, saying a lot with a little. I have no patience when I read a script where the writer describes this guy and what he's wearing and his glasses and his hair.

A writer is in the broadest sense a spokesman of his community. Through him that community comes to know its heart. Without such knowledge, how long can it survive?

Write it as it is, don't try to make it like this or that. You can't do it in anybody else's way-you will have to make a way of your own.

Readers soon tire of prefaces, and skip them, and so the labor of writing them is lost.

I think I'm way too much of a control freak to co-author anything with anyone. I have a hard enough time writing with myself! I admire people that can do it, but it's not for me.

I say I drownin' in river. She don't look me like I'm crazy but say, If you just sit there the river gonna rise up drown you! Writing could be the boat carry you to the other side. (97)

I lose things. I write things and they disappear from my desk, my life. I move a lot. I wanted to gather them and put them under one roof, under one cover, so I could document my life in a series of snapshots.

I was looking at a lot of experimental writers, and I was very intrigued by short-short fiction, writers who would write little things, what I call buttons now, little vignettes.

Your prospective employer, or the person you have a crush on, or the person you want to talk to. You're judging yourself, you know, thinking about your listener. You're not thinking about what you're saying. And that same thing happens when you write.

I tell people to write the stories that you're afraid to talk about, the stories you wish you'd forget, because those have the most power. Those are the ones that have the most strength when you give them as a testimony.

A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.

The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it.

When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence.

I write about myself with the same pencil and in the same exercise book as about him. It is no longer I, but another whose life is just beginning.

Write me up for 125, poster my face wanted dead or alive. Take my license all that jive, I can't drive 55.

I don't write songs, songs write me. ... Writing a song can be agony or ecstasy. It can take half an hour or half a year. ... The popular song is America's greatest ambassador.

When you write you in a way write out of what you think of as your best self, the part of you that is lacking in foibles and weaknesses and egotism and vanities and so on. You're just trying to really say something as truthful as you can out of the best that you have in you.

In writing 'The Satanic Verses,' I think I was writing for the first time from the whole of myself. The English part, the Indian part. The part of me that loves London, and the part that longs for Bombay. And at my typewriter, alone, I could indulge this.