Writing Quotes - Page 374

Don't be afraid to write bad songs and then start over and re-evaluate. Songs are like plants, in that you grow them. Some grow really fast, and others need pruning and care...And, finally, a song needs to move you. If it doesn't move you, it will never move anybody else.

I wish, naturally to prevent the possibility that someone may write an accidental, superficial, incomplete and perhaps untrue picture of me.

It is precisely the sort of thing I am always trying to do in my writing -- to present my unhappy reader with a wide-ranged chaos -- of actions and reactions, thoughts, memories and feelings -- in the vain hope that at the end he will see that the whole thing represents only one moment, one feeling, one person. A raging, trumpeting jungle of associations, and then I announce at the end of it, with a gesture of despair, "This is I!

When you write a song, the goal is not to convey the details of your life. You should write a memoir or something if that's what you're going to do.

I know that people look at my life and ask, "How can I achieve some of those things?" So, I suppose in that sense, yes, I'm a role model. But I try to think of myself more as a mentor, as somebody who I hope young people feel comfortable approaching or writing to.

The attributes you need to be a travel writer are somewhat contradictory. For travel you need to be tough and resilient and to write you must be sensitive and sympathetic.

Bernard Williams has been a distinctive presence on the intellectual scene for more than three decades. . . . His writings do not offer the dubious exhilaration of grand philosophical theory, in which messy reality is tamed and caged, but the thrill of seeing pretension punctured by a kind of high-voltage common sense (backed up by impressive erudition). . . . There is no one in philosophy quite like him.

Plotting isn't like sex, because you can go back and adjust it afterwards. Whether you plan your story beforehand or not, if the climax turns out to be the revelation that the mad professor's anti-gravity device actually works, you must go back and silently delete all those flying cars buzzing around the city on page one. If you want to reveal something, you need to hide it properly first.

The whole point about vision is that it's very individual, it's very personal, and it has to be confessional. It has to be something which hurts - the pulling out of it and putting it on the page hurts. Art can be about the individual writer's response to his or her condition, and if that response comes out of a predigested belief about what the audience wants to hear about the writer's condition, then it has no truth, it has no validity. You either write with your own blood or nobody's. Otherwise it's just ink.

Writing is a creative art form and the acting and directing is more of an interpretive art form.

I pay tribute to the writing always. The writer is a creative artist and the director is an interpretive artist and the actors are interpretive. You take zero and make it into something, that's always amazing to me.

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

I don't have the notion that everybody has to write in some single academic style

As a kid, I said, 'I want to write for movies.' When I finally had that opportunity it was like I was able to exhale. 'Wow, I'm finally doing this for real.

No generality has any weight whatever. It is like saying "how do you do?" When you have no intention of inquiring about ones health. But specific claims when made in print are taken at their value

Others are writing my biography, and let it rest as they elect to make it. I have lived my life, well and ill, always less well than I wanted it to be but it is, as it is, and as it has been; so small a thing, to have had so much about it!

Remember: a story is not a vignette. It has a beginning, middle and an end. It is not merely a snapshot in time.

My writing has to excite people and depict or include their experiences. That's part of my process - to go out and interact with people. It's very much like an archival process. I understand that the Brothers Grimm would go out and get people talking so they could document folk tales that weren't being documented any other way. I try to offer a little bit of myself - some experience from my life that evokes stories in other people.

When I first started writing, there was no way I'd write a sex scene. That just seemed impossible. That's why in "Fight Club" all the sex happens off-screen. It's all just a noise on the other side of the wall or the ceiling. I just couldn't bring to write in a scene like that. So one of the challenges with "Choke" was I wanted to write sex scenes until I was really comfortable just writing them in a very mechanical way.

It seems that so much writing is being done in the nineteenth-century model, where every connection has to be thoroughly explained.

Real writers write because they love to write. They don't write for public acclaim.

That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can't control life, at least you can control your version.

Whether it's string writing or whatever, I try to write for what each instrumentalist can do best.

If we fulfill our responsibility to the Constitution, the Supreme Court will be filled with superior legal minds who will pursue the one agenda that our founding fathers intended in writing the Constitution: justice, rather than political or personal goals.

I try to make the writing as regular and regimented as possible. I usually get up at around 5 a.m. and read what I wrote the day before. Some of the time, after I read, I think the writing's very good and some of the time I feel embarrassed by what I've written. You have to learn not to pay too much attention to these feelings.