Writing Quotes - Page 375

One should never write down or up to people, but out of yourself.

We’re happier when the assholes are villains.

We are living in a renaissance of personal writing. People are rebalancing the impersonalization endemic to modern society with an increase in personal introspection. We have enough common psychology under our belts to know that psychology doesn't explain or heal everything and that it isn't the fulfillment of awareness, but its beginning. We are undergoing a shift in paradigms in which we are trying to develop new models for humanness and human responsibility. This is no small task. Our individual lives are placed under increasing pressure to respond adequately to both inner and outer change.

Journal writing is a voyage to the interior.

Genius makes its observations in short-hand; talent writes them out at length.

Sarah Palin - now don't laugh - is writing a book. Not just reading a book, writing a book. Actually, in the word of the publisher, she's 'collaborating' on a book. What an embarrassment! It's one of these 'I told you,' books that jocks do.

We never let go. Ever. Even with punctuation. It's frightening. I can't see anyone from any record company ever writing an email to Neil and not getting it back, with corrections.

I remember listening to the radio as a kid and finding that the songs always made me feel more peaceful. Funny, but the more hurtin' the music was, the better it made me feel. I think of that now when I write my songs. I may not be feelin' the blues myself, but I'm writing them for other people who have a hard life.

Lie. Put down on paper the most interesting lies you can imagine. . .and then make them plausible.

When Rimbaud became a slave trader, he stopped writing poetry.

I think an artist, in my definition of that word, would not be someone who takes sides with the emperor against his powerless subjects. That's different from prescribing a way in which a writer should write.

Most writers who are beginners, if they are honest with themselves, will admit that they are praying for a readership as they begin to write. But it should be the quality of the craft, not the audience, that should be the greatest motivating factor.

You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it's hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it's better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can't write anybody's book but your own.

Set a goal, write it down, and release the outcome. Small steps make a big difference.

The peculiarity of all death-based religions is that their subject-matter is entirely outside of facts. Men could think and think, talk and argue, advance, deny, assert, and controversy, and write innumerable books, without being hampered at any time by any fact.

I try when I'm writing to leave enough "space" for people to have their own interpretation, and not to direct it toward one conclusion. Then the audience would not be reacting, because they are being preached to or lectured at. I don't have that much to say that I think people should listen to me.

In the U.K. I'm probably better known as a comedy writer - or certainly that's my background is in writing comedy.

I'm trying my hand at writing. I'm writing a couple of projects for HBO, a half hour comedy and a miniseries.

What do you think happens to a composer who is sincere and loves to write and has to wait thirty years to have someone play a piece of his music?

Just because I'm playing jazz I don't forget about me. I play or write me, the way I feel, through jazz, or whatever.

It's almost a sort of fairy story tale, just what a novelist would write about a discovery.

Get yourself a notebook and write in it EVERY night for two weeks. Then stop if you can. If you can't, you're a writer.

I had never taken creative writing classes. Hadn't even considered it.

Take the pencil and write under my name, 'I forgive her.

I believe a good writer can write a good book with any sort of character, in any sort of setting, but I prefer to write about the outsider. It might just be because I've been one (or perceived myself to be one) for so much of my life. But the simple fact of being marginalized immediately brings conflict to a story before the narrative even begins, and that's gold for a writer because it means that your character already has depth before events begin to unfold.