Writing Quotes - Page 309

The first thing a writer has to do is find another source of income. Then, after you have begged, borrowed, stolen or saved up the money to give you time to write and you spend all of it staying alive while you write, and you write your heart out, after all that, maybe no one will publish it, and if they publish it, maybe no one will read it. That is the hard truth, that is what it means to be a writer.

Tell me the truth about death. I don't know what it is. We have them, then they are gone but they stay in our minds. Their stories are part of us as long as we live and as long as we tell them or write them down.

Writing doesn't come easily to me. It gets more and more difficult.

So are you turning out like them? Do you still write and draw?" "yeah, but I don't do anything personnal or profound. My parents take life way to seriousely. I lke to make people laugh. I had a regular cartoon feature in the school news paper and created some for the year book. Social satire stuff. I've done a couple of political cartoons for wisteria's paper and just got one accepted in Easton's, which has a much bigger circulation. Impressed?

The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written.

And as to experience-well, think how little some good poets have had, or how much some bad ones have.

I listen to music when I write. I need the musical background. Classical music. I'm behind the times. I'm still with Baroque music, Gregorian chant, the requiems, and with the quartets of Beethoven and Brahms. That is what I need for the climate, for the surroundings, for the landscape: the music.

Miller didn't write Death of a Salesman. He released it. It was there inside him, waiting to be turned loose. That's the measure of its merit.

The writer, when he is also an artist, is someone who admits what others don't dare reveal.

Initially I started writing because I felt like I didn't fit in. I just moved to a new school and I felt quite lonely. I think that's where it all started for me.

I really wanted to write an adventure story, a murder-mystery that was set during the gold-rush years in New Zealand.

We're not descended from fearful men - not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.

The Simonian system can be extracted from the writings of Hippolytus. The cosmos begins with the one root, which is unfathomable Silence, pre-existent, limitless power, existing in singleness. It bestirs itself and assumes a determinate aspect by turning into Thinking (Nous, i.e. Mind), from which comes forth the Thought (Epinoia). As soon as thought is born out of the thinking silence, suddenly one has become two.

Writers are the main landmarks of the past.

I write to find out what I'm talking about.

In this respect a program is like a poem: you cannot write a poem without writing it. Yet people talk about programming as if it were a production process and measure "programmer productivity" in terms of "number of lines of code produced". In so doing they book that number on the wrong side of the ledger: we should always refer to "the number of lines of code spent".

A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public eye with his pants down.

It's difficult to write a really good short story because it must be a complete and finished reflection of life with only a few words to use as tools. There isn't time for bad writing in a short story.

Tennessee Williams recognized that great theater begins with great talkers, and that great talkers obey two rules: they never sound like anyone else and they never say anything directly.

One day I wrote her name upon the strand, But came the waves and washèd it away: Again I wrote it with a second hand, But came the tide and made my pains his prey. Vain man (said she) that dost in vain assay A mortal thing so to immortalise; For I myself shall like to this decay, And eke my name be wipèd out likewise. Not so (quod I); let baser things devise To die in dust, but you shall live by fame; My verse your virtues rare shall eternise, And in the heavens write your glorious name: Where, when as Death shall all the world subdue, Our love shall live, and later life renew.

I'd like to produce, direct, write, score, and star in a film in exactly the way Chaplin did. I'll do that before I'm thirty.

History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.

A novelist is a person who lives in other people's skins.

A writer is like a bean plant - he has his little day, and then gets stringy.

Only a person who is congenially self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays