Writing Quotes - Page 326

I think when I started to write The Mysterious Benedict Society that I had that kind of thing in mind - the notion of having to be able to solve puzzles and riddles because enormous stakes rode upon your ability to do that.

If you like to tell stories and compose sentences, and if you work hard at being good at these things, then you are a writer even if you haven't published anything.

I've been writing on my own. It's like Roger Miller used to say, every now and then, like a dog having puppies, you have to crawl under the house and do it yourself.

I write plays and movies, I live and work at the borderline between word and image just as any cartoonist or illustrator does. I’m not a pure writer. I use words as the score for kinetic imagistic representations.

The people whose necks hurt when I write about the Middle East tend to live in Brooklyn or Boca Raton: the kind of Zionist who pays another man to live in Israel for him. I have nothing but contempt for such people.

I know what I write about seems exotic to a lot of people, but not for me. I pulled up to an old trading post and saw a few elderly Navajos sitting on a bench. I felt right at home.

Wait, wait, wait, wait. Don't try to write through it, to force it. Many do, but that won't work. Just wait, it will come.

It's a dismally lonely business, writing.

People have to be given permission to write, and they have to be given space to breathe and stumble. They have to be given time to develop and to reveal what they can do.

If I have an idea, I write it down, although I usually carry a little dictation machine with me because I'm too lazy to write

Then l learned to play guitar and l started writing songs and my mother formed for me a publishing business, so we started publishing and managing artists.

Practice? I never practice. I just write songs and take solos.

Real programmers don't comment their code. If it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand.

I had the notion that I wanted to write the great dirty American novel, so I went to Roanoke College on the GI Bill.

I write plays because writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal, and rebut the refutation.

He's never known anything like it! But then, he has never known anything to write home about, so this is nothing to write home about.

The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.

TV writing is different than other mediums, involving the writer.

Probably the best way to describe my writing style is to refer you to "purple prose", which was a tag given to the early mass market magazine writers earning a half cent a word for their fiction. They had to use every adjective, verb and adverb in the English language to add word count to stories in order to feed and support families.

Deleting 200 spams a day is a drag. And I was checking my email constantly, rather than getting on with my real work, which is reading and writing. Email was becoming a distraction, a burden rather than a liberation.

I was asked by a group to write a song on the theme of brotherhood. This was before women's liberation, when brotherhood meant men and women both, so I wrote the song. Since I had always been very fond of the Passion Chorale, I wrote words to that great piece.

They say poets write mostly for themselves; if anyone else likes it, well and good, if not, it doesn't matter; certainly, not to me.

I wrote a script. I actually enjoyed writing it more than acting. It's about the Irish rebellion of 1920, which is a fascinating period and place for me

A good journalist is not the one that writes what people say, but the one that writes what he is supposed to write.

I like to make up songs. And it's my opinion that all these songs mean a lot to me, but that doesn't mean I think everything needs to leave the house. If it helps me through my life and doesn't bore anybody in theirs.