Writing Quotes - Page 363

When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules of theirs. I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. Essentially your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb's bleat.

Write while the heat is in you.

We can never safely exceed the actual facts in our narratives. Of pure invention, such as some suppose, there is no instance. To write a true work of fiction even is only to take leisure and liberty to describe some things more exactly as they are.

It's rather fun writing a female spy, because she has so much more kit. Bond never carried a hair dryer or a makeup bag. And he certainly didn't wear an uplift bra.

However, the difficulties and pleasures of the writing itself are similar for a novel with a historical setting and a novel with a contemporary setting, as far as I'm concerned.

I enjoy research; in fact research is so engaging that it would be easy to go on for years, and never write the novel at all.

I love to write quartets. One could say that this is a mania.

Prayer is like practicing the piano or ballet or writing: you have to bring your body for a very long time, in spite of your body’s frailties and conflicts and general revolt, and then one day your body is not separate any more. You’ve in a sense become the piano or the dance or the word or the prayer. The prayer is in your heart. The prayer is your heart.

When I was a teenager, I thought how great it would be if only I could write novels in English. I had the feeling that I would be able to express my emotions so much more directly than if I wrote in Japanese.

Writers have to keep on writing if they want to mature, like caterpillars endlessly chewing on leaves.

For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I'm still awake. I can continue yesterday's dream today, something you can't normally do in everyday life.

I'll write to you. A super-long letter, like in an old-fashioned novel

You always have to write script with a budget in mind. Although it's always good to write the big story, you really have to think about how things are going to work as far as cast, effects and settings. It's a process. You have to always think budget and then execute and make it happen.

When I was confronted with official tuition, the academic thing, I could see no relationship whatever between that and the music I'd been writing since I was 11.

I found I'm quite happy working on a sentence for an hour or more, searching for the right phrase, the right word. I compare it to the work of a stonecutter - chipping away at the raw material until it's just right, or as right as you can get it.

People who write for reward by way of recognition or monetary gain don't know what they're doing. They're in the category of those who write; they are not writers. Writing is simply something you must do. It's rather like virtue in that it is its own reward. Writing is selfish and contradictory in its terms. First of all, you're writing for an audience of one, you must please the one person you're writing for. Yourself.

Writing is something you'll never learn in any university or at any school. It's something that is within you, and if it isn't there, nothing can put it there.

I asked Ring Lardner the other day how he writes his short stories, and he said he wrote a few widely separated words or phrases on a piece of paper and then went back and filled in the spaces.

You're a writer. And that's something better than being a millionaire. Because it's something holy.

What I want to do is tell stories about normal people in the American suburbs. I don't write the book where it's a conspiracy reaching the prime minister; I don't write the book with the big serial killer who lops off heads. My setting is a very placid pool of suburbia, family life. And within that I can make pretty big splashes.

Information is floating around really fast. I write something, or a piece of my music comes out and I see people writing about it on the Internet as if I'm having a conversation with them. We've never met, but somehow, my music is communicating something to them. Very often, it really makes them feel something.

In the past, you would take the time to write a love letter and you would think about what you wanted to say and compose it in a certain way. Now, everything is so short. It has to be, because it is rushed, and therefore, in a way, it loses a little bit of its importance. But I think it is very important to take the time to say what you want to say.

There are probably seven persons, in all, who really like my work; and they are enough. I should write even if I were the only patient reader, for my aim is merely self-expression.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge.