Writing Quotes - Page 289

Because, if one is writing novels today, concentrating on the beauty of the prose is right up there with concentrating on your semi-colons, for wasted effort.

The best advice I can give on this is, once it's done, to put it away until you can read it with new eyes. Finish the short story, print it out, then put it in a drawer and write other things. When you're ready, pick it up and read it, as if you've never read it before. If there are things you aren't satisfied with as a reader, go in and fix them as a writer: that's revision.

If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist.

All fiction is a process of imagining: whatever you write, in whatever genre or medium, your task is to make things up convincingly and interestingly and new.

Isolation is a big part of songwriting.

If you read good books, when you write, good books will come out of you.

I wonder if I don't give too much of myself to writing: I am always half where I am; the other half is feeding the furnace, kick-starting the heat of creativity. I am making love with someone but at the same time I'm noticing how this graceful hand across my belly might just fit in with the memory of lilacs in Albuquerque in 1974.

Some writers find that they don't know their themes until they've finished the first draft (I am one). They then rewrite with an eye toward balancing on that tightrope: not too contrived, not too rambling; does what I'm saying about the world below me actually add up to anything? Other writers pay attention to these things as they write the first draft. Either way, an awareness of the macro and micro levels of theme can provide one more tool for thinking about what you should write, and how.

Perhaps there is no other way of reaching some understanding of being than through art? Writers themselves don't analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope. To say this is not to mystify the process of writing but to make an image out of the intense inner concentration the writer must have to cross the chasms of the aleatory and make them the word's own, as an explorer plants a flag.

It's absolutely fatal to your writing to think about how your work will be received. It's a betrayal of whatever talent you have.

My main interests right now are to publish, to write, to explicate various views which I hope have an impact on thinking people.

I work every day - or at least I force myself into office or room. I may get nothing done, but you don't earn bonuses without putting in time. Nothing may come for three months, but you don't earn the fourth without it.

Well, when I was a young writer the people we read were Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sartre, Camus, Celine, Malraux. And to begin with, I was a bit of a copycat writer and very derivative and tried to write a novel using their voices, really.... I keep it out of print.

When we were making the law, when we were writing the literature and the mathematics the grandfarthers of Blair and little Bush were scratching around in caves.

Nasr combines in his writing audacious intellectual criticism, deep understanding of Islam... and a commitment to the Western-European contributions to the emancipation of the human condition.

Once, lovers on faraway shores sat by candlelight and dipped ink to parchment, writing words that could not be erased. They took an evening to compose their thoughts, maybe the next evening as well.

Well, I like to write poetry. I'm a published poet.

There is some pressure when you are a woman doing what I do that you must support all other women unconditionally, no matter what they're projecting, or writing, or producing, or putting forth as their art. I think that's equally arbitrary and random and unfair, and kind of sexist. The secretly sexist way. I have really high standards for what I think is funny. I have that for everything, and I think it would be disingenuous of me to blanket-ly love everything a woman has produced simply to make a statement that we're all in this together.

I write in my sleep. I don't know how, but I'll work on a song, go to sleep and it's finished when I wake up.

If you're going to have someone win because of their story, go write a screenplay about your life.

I said to [Lionel] Richie, "Man, my wife says you must really respect women because you write such beautiful love songs."

In making movies, time is so short-because it is so expensive-that we tend to neglect the place from which the best ideas come, namely that part of ourselves that dreams. The unconscious is our best collaborator.

The best work is done with the heart breaking, or overflowing.

Painting for process is the visual equivalent of journal writing, done not for the sake of being seen or published, but purely for the telling itself.

When I write, I tend toward melancholy, and the few times that I've tried pure joy in music, it doesn't really work that well. The joy can be through catharsis. I think that's what I do well, and observation.