Writing Quotes - Page 333

My first job was with the Burns Detective Agency. They sent me over to the East River to guard coal barges during these god-awful hours like three to six in the morning. It wasn't a very difficult job -- all I had to do was make a round every fifteen minutes -- but it turned out to be a great environment for writing. I was completely alone in a little outhouse with an electric heater and a little desk.

Write what you know. Write what you don't know. But most of all, write what you'd rather not know.

Galway Kinnell came out with that wonderful big, breathy, hollow voice of his and read, for the first time in public, "The Bear." That poem impressed me so much that I memorized it. I used it for years when I taught in prisons. It's a powerful extended metaphor for what the writing life is really all about. It's a uniquely powerful poem about self-transformation, and that's what we're asking, really, beyond even our objection to the war. We're asking people to look at themselves and think about what might be possible with a little self-transformation.

I dedicate this novel to Gala, who was constantly by my side while I was writing it, who was the good fairy of my equilibrium, who banished the salamanders of my doubts and strengthened the lions of certainties.

When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away.

In general, writers shouldn't be killed for what they write, though I can think of exceptions.

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

Producing is hell, writing is frustrating, acting is really satisfying, directing is heaven.

I count myself one of the number of those who write as they learn and learn as they write.

...a story should be like a roller coaster. That is to say before writing a really cruel scene, I have to lift the people's spirits, for example, with a fun scene... Before writing a scene of pure despair, we must go through scenes of hope. And indeed, when I write, all of this amuses me very much.

Imagine Eminem writing a play with complex raps and syllables, and melodies flowing in and out. That's what it was like for me listening to Lin-Manuel Miranda, it was incredible. So it just goes to show that if you put your teaching style in a certain form, that will attract the attention of the people you are trying to teach.

I was always the type of drug user that I had no moderation. When I was smoking and drinking, I was full on smoking and drinking. And I am also the type of drug user where I do smoke and drink, there's no creativity in terms of my writing process. I would just stare at the paper for hours and nothing would get done.

I am dissatisfied with everything I have ever written and regard it all only as a preparation for that one work which probably I don't have it in me to write but which I hope I can go on trying for.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer showed the whole world, and an entire sprawling industry, that writing monsters and demons and end-of-the-world is not hack-work, it can challenge the best. Joss Whedon raised the bar for every writer - not just genre or niche writers, but every single one of us.

Anything works, as long as you write it properly.

A completed book exists in its entirety, although we humans read it in a time sequence from the beginning to the end. Just as an author does not write the first chapter, and then leave the others to write themselves, So God's creativity is not to seem as uniquely confined to, or even especially invested in, the event of the Big Bang. Rather his creativity has been seen as permeating equally all space and all time: his role as Creator and Sustainer merge.

Every journalist has a novel in him, which is an excellent place for it.

I enjoyed having a reputation as being wild, but these days I try not to worry about what people think in the privacy of their own brain or what they write in the bizarre publicity of their own newspapers, because all of those things are meaningless.

It takes great self-confidence to write a newspaper column. Some might say it takes arrogance. Be that as it may, my willingness to pronounce on a great many matters of which I have little or no knowledge is one of my prime qualifications for this trade.

If you go through any newspaper or magazine and look for active, kicking verbs in the sentences, you will realize that this lack of well used verbs is the main trouble with modern English writing. Almost all nonfiction nowadays is written in a sort of pale, colorless sauce of passives and infinitives, motionless and flat as paper.

I didn't write because in the corps I took mining engineering of all things and, you know, they, they graduate a mining engineer as a sort of an illiterate.

Everyone should read, we say, but we act as if only those with special talent should write.

Writing good ads is easy when you have something to say.

I wanted to write as well as I possibly could to deal with life-and-death problems in contemporary society. And the form of Wilkie Collins and Graham Greene, of Hammett and Chandler, seemed to offer me all the rope I would ever need.

I have seen incredible bravery from very young guys, the young generation that people write off.