Writing Quotes - Page 358

War and Peace maddens me because I didn't write it myself, and worse, I couldn't.

My last point about getting started as a writer: do something first, good or bad, successful or not, and write it up before approaching an editor. The best introduction to an editor is your own written work, published or not. I traveled across Siberia on my own money before ever approaching an editor; I wrote my first book, Siberian Dawn, without knowing a single editor, with no idea of how to get it published. I had to risk my life on the Congo before selling my first magazine story. If the rebel spirit dwells within you, you won't wait for an invitation, you'll invade and take no hostages.

If you have a craftsman's command of the language and basic writing techniques you'll be able to write - as long as you know what you want to say

Readers are paramount. I live to write books for them.

Writing songs has always been hard and easy. It's not always easy when you want it to be, and then sometimes it's just like turning on the faucet. That's just the nature of it.

...there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you.

Even with a small video we will always be able to do a small movie with friends and to show it to someone. You won't get the Oscar for it. But, after all, why are you writing and why are you filming?

Talent is like a faucet, while it is open, one must write.

I think it's dangerous to think you know what you're writing. I usually don't know, and usually I just discover it in the course of writing. I envy those writers who can outline a beginning, a middle, and end. Fitzgerald supposedly did it. John Irving does. Bret Easton Ellis does. But for me, the writing itself is the process of discovery. I can't see all that far ahead.

I'm not buying a boat because of writing skits.

I like heist movies. I like action movies that set all the elements into one and a chance to do something that comes from a great stable of writing.

Introspection and preserved writings give us far more insight into the ways of past humans than we have into the ways of past dinosaurs. For that reason, I'm optimistic that we can eventually arrive at convincing explanations for these broadest patterns of human history.

Put a chair against the door, and turn the lights down low Write a letter to yourself, no one will ever know

I write a lot from instinct. But as you're writing out of instinct, once you reach a certain level as a songwriter, the craft is always there talking to you in the back of your head...that tells you when it's time to go to the chorus, when it's time to rhyme. Real basic craft... it's second nature.

I've found you can go on writing in the dark, and that the act of writing itself, that mysterious, dangerous, intoxicating, absorbing, nourishing magician's trick, that act of creation is its own light.

In literature only trouble is interesting. It takes trouble to turn the great themes of life into a story: birth, love, sex, work, and death.

I want to understand the piers of language and music and comprehension that can hold up a building even when what the building houses is an earthquake. This thinking must surely come into the poems I write, but more by osmosis than will.

I want to preserve a certain unknowing about my own poems - perhaps because unknowing is in itself a useful poetic thirst. To move the perimeter of saying outside my own boundaries is one reason I write.

Metaphors get under your skin by ghosting right past the logical mind.

Oh! write, write. Finish it at once. Let there be an end of this suspense. Fix, commit, condemn yourself.

A person who can write a long letter with ease, cannot write ill.

I think all good writing is a struggle. To write as well as you feel you can has to be a struggle, almost by definition, because you could always improve.

My first novel is loaded with food references largely because my cupboards were bare, and I was writing hungry.

When I have my Afro and walk down the street, there's no doubt that I'm black. With this [straightened] hair, if I talk about being black on air, viewers write and say, "You're black?!" I feel [straightening your hair] is giving up a sense of your identity. Let's be honest: It's an effort to look Anglo-Saxon.

I write abundantly. And then my next step is to struggle to reduce the ornament, to reduce the abundance-to prune the book, in other words, the way one prunes a tree-so it can grow. This is my idea of a book.