Writing Quotes - Page 359

Over the next four days, I want you to write about your deepest emotions and thoughts about the most upsetting experience in your life. Really let go and explore your feelings and thoughts about it. In your writing, you might tie this experience to your childhood, your relationship with your parents, people you have loved or love now or even your career. How is this experience related to who you would like to become, who you have been in the past, or who you are now?.

The whole joy of writing comes from the opportunity to go over it and make it good, one way or another.

Nature fits all her children with something to do, he who would write and can't write, can surely review.

Writing is like washing windows in the sun. With every attempt to perfect clarity, you make a new smear.

One would think that in writing about literary men and matters there would be no difficulty in finding a title for one's essay, or that any embarrassment which might arise would be from excess of material. I find this, however, far from being the case.

A good day's writing, when I turn off my computer after I know that I've written okay, or as well as I can write, that's a day well spent.

I must confess that when I'm alone in my study, here in New York, writing; that's when I'm happy.

Use familiar words-words that your readers will understand, and not words they will have to look up. No advice is more elementary, and no advice is more difficult to accept. When we feel an impulse to use a marvelously exotic word, let us lie down until the impulse goes away.

The Sopranos all came down to the writing. I wouldn't have been on for as long as I was if the writing weren't so good.

I have a great amount of confidence and faith in my abilities to write. There are other areas of my life where I'm not as confident, and have not as much faith, but when it comes down to writing and working, I don't worry about it. I trust myself to get it right.

My mother and I will continue on some level that I havent determined yet. I think my mothers a great character, and I have to say that giving my mother to the world has to be the biggest thrill of my writing career.

Style in painting is the same as in writing,-a power over materials, whether words or colors.

If you write well, you don't have to dress funny.

I never write a tune before the lyrics. I get the lyrics and then I write around them. Some people write music and the lyrics come along and they say, 'Oh yeah, I've got something to fit that.' If that's the way people write songs, I feel like you might as well just go to the supermarket.

I set myself a rule before I actually write a tune to the lyrics, and the rule is that I've got to take the lyrics on to a level of understanding before I can actually write music to them. What I'm doing is interpretation. If I don't write the lyrics, therefore I must interpret them to the best of my ability. So my rule is that I must understand it, but I don't necessarily have to accept.

My major aim in writing is to set out flags and issue wake-up calls.

I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically.

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

I write at eighty-five for the same reasons that impelled me to write at forty-five; I was born with a passionate desire to communicate, to organize experience, to tell tales that dramatize the adventures which readers might have had. I have been that ancient man who sat by the campfire at night and regaled the hunters with imaginative recitations about their prowess. The job of an apple tree is to bear apples. The job of a storyteller is to tell stories, and I have concentrated on that obligation.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always be seen as untimely. This is because a real writer is always shifting and changing and searching. The world has many labels for him, of which the most treacherous is the label of Success.

When you're writing you're trying to find out something which you don't know.

The writer's greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody, in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all.

Race as a subject only comes about because of what I look like. If I say something truthfully, people say "Oh, she's so angry." If I write about a married person who lives in Vermont, it becomes "Oh, she's autobiographical."

What I really want to write about is injustice and justice, and the different ways human beings organize the two.