Writing Quotes - Page 297

Beyond my anxiety, beyond this writing, the universe waits, inexhaustible, inviting.

I don't mind when people are telling me about their 1971 Firebird, but it's the same thing as people telling me about their car or something. It's fine if you have an interest. By talking with me, though, you could be interviewing a novelist about guitars. It's the same thing, except I don't write that well either.

Once I got the open tunings for some reason, I began to get the harmonic sophistication that I heard that my musical fountain inside was excited by. Once I got some interesting chords to play with, my writing began to come.

At the point where I'm trying to force something and it's not happening, and I'm getting frustrated with, say, writing a poem, I can go and pick up the brushes and start painting. At the point where the painting seems to not be going anywhere, I go and pick up the guitar.

The best Maxim I know in this life is, to drink your Coffee when you can, and when you cannot, to be easy without it. While you continue to be splenetic, count upon it I will always preach. Thus much I sympathize with you that I am not cheerful enough to write, for I believe Coffee once a week is necessary to that.

With writing, we have second chances.

I genuinely find it difficult to think of places that I'd never want to see again. It might be because part of my career has been concerned with writing about topography.

If you're going to write about something it becomes a damn sight more interesting than if you're not going to write about it, because you engage with it actively in a way that you wouldn't if you were just passing through or if you were going to St Helens to visit family or if it was a place that made you resentful because you'd always wanted to escape from there.

I love acting in the theater,but I'm fascinated with acting on film. If it's a film or a play or whatever, if the writing is good and you really feel passionate about it, you just can't lose. You'll grow from it. Whether it's a success or not is neither here nor there; you're going to grow as an artist from this experience.

I write about what interests me. It's very dangerous when you try to satisfy an audience.

If I don't feel like writing today or for a few days, I don't. And I don't think about it. It is not an obligation-it is the greatest privilege.

I would like all my friends, followers, fans and fellow travelers to know that I am fighting cancer and will therefore be taking a break from performing while getting the treatment and cure. I shall of course be continuing to write music - in my world it just has to be part of the therapy - and I fully expect to be back in good shape next year.

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.

Maybe the hardest thing in writing is simply to tell the truth about things as we see them.

In writing, habit seems to be a much stronger force than either willpower or inspiration.

I find it fascinating that Paul [the apostol], writing to the Galatians, responds to the question, "What does it mean to live in Christ?" by saying, "There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus."

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts - the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.

I can almost always write music; at any hour of the twenty-four, if I put pencil to paper, music comes.

Asking a writer what he thinks about criticism is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs.

Book reviewers are little old ladies of both sexes.

The only rule I have found to have any validity in writing is not to bore yourself.

I don't have to worry about any pop sensibility. I can write adult songs, and I don't have to worry about choruses and hook lines.

I love pop music. It's not easy to write a good pop song.

Our everyday language has become encumbered, Germanic, artificial, bureaucratic, inorganic. It may not be exaggerated to say that by now American writers face but two alternatives: write English, or write gobbledygook.

In my opinion, understanding who your target audience is, and what they want, and writing to them (and only them!) is the most important component of being successful as an author.