Writing Quotes - Page 364

Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black looked at in the right light and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart.

Writing songs is super intimate. It's a bit like getting naked.

When you write a great song, it just blows you away. When you write a song that connects with people around the world - I mean like it actually transcends language barriers - you see how it can affect people, and it's quite a tall order to follow up on.

Just start scribbling. The first draft is never your last draft. Nothing you write is by accident.

Read the sacred writings of all the peoples on Earth. Through all of them runs, like a red thread, the hidden Science of attaining and maintaining wakefulness.

You are just in the middle of a struggle with words which are really very stubborn things, with a blank page, with the damn thing that you use to write with, a pen or a typewriter, and you forget all about the reader when you are doing that

I don't much believe in the idea of characters. I write with words, that is all. Whether those words are put in the mouth of this or that character does not matter to me

It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down.

No, absolutely not, writing doesn't have to be like a jigsaw puzzle, it can be a very linear undertaking.

When I write, I enjoy myself so much that what is being written really needs no reader

I write about situations that are common, universal might be more correct, in which my characters are involved and from which only faith can redeem them, though often the actual manner of the redemption is not immediately clear. They sin, but there is no limit to God's mercy and because this is important, there is a difference between not confessing in fact, and the complacent and the pious may not realize it.

A talent for drama is not a talent for writing, but is ability to articulate human relationships.

Constant work, constant writing and constant revision. The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge. What he takes in he takes in normally the way any person takes in experience. But it is what is done with it in his mind, if he is a real writer, that makes his art.

That famous writer’s block is a myth as far as I’m concerned. I think bad writers must have a great difficulty writing. They don’t want to do it. They have become writers out of reasons of ambition. It must be a great strain to them to make marks on a page when they really have nothing much to say, and don’t enjoy doing it. I’m not so sure what I have to say but I certainly enjoy making sentences.

I sometimes think it is because they are so bad at expressing themselves verbally that writers take to pen and paper in the first place

Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.

I write in the morning at a table, longhand on yellow legal pads, just like Nixon, when I’m doing fiction.

I try to write songs. At our concerts, we take the cream of the crop from my back catalogue and I don't know if I could write something now that would replace any of that. We don't lose any of the standards. We have lots of songs in rotation.

Sometimes God writes straightforward in twisted lines.

Writing keeps me from believing everything I read.

The act of writing is the act of making soul, alchemy.

Not to sound egomaniac or anything, but just to get under people's skin like that, and for them to believe in you and believe strongly enough to write... it's flattering and it helps you during the day.

At some point I realized that the text was the painting and that everything else was extraneous. The painting became the act of writing a text on a canvas, but in all my work, text turns into abstraction.

But when you get to a song, not only do you have to do a vocal melody, you have to write words and not be redundant and make some semblance of a story

My fellow actors inspire me a lot and really good writing inspires me. And then trying to stick to the decision to only do something that I think will challenge me and that I, personally and very subjectively, I think is good not do something because I think it will bring me a lot of money or bring me a lot of awards. I've tried to very, very rigorously be highly subjective about what I do. And that's something that I think I have basically lived by.