Writing Quotes - Page 390

Why do you always write poetry? Why do you not write prose? Prose is so much more difficult.

The first thing you have to know about writing is that it is something you must do every day - every morning or every night, whatever time it is that you have. Ideally, the time you decide on is also the time when you do your best work.

Words signify man's refusal to accept the world as it is.

Being a writer was never a choice, it was an irresistible compulsion.

I wouldn't not want to be a director and write as I wouldn't not to want to be a writer and direct movies.

I'm doing my best. I read in the paper that I'm an action director. They always say that, "Action director Walter Hill", if they bother writing about me at all. I think that's fine. I'm happy to do the work.

If a young man at the age of twenty-three can write a symphony like that, in five years he will be ready to commit murder.

Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the church is often labeled today as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

If I could only write, I'd write a nasty letter to the mayor, if he could only read.

I think I write fiction for the opportunity to get beyond the limits of my own life.

However far fiction writers stray from their own lives and experiences - and I stray pretty far from mine - I think, ultimately, that we may be writing what we need to write in some way, albeit unconsciously.

Life consists Of propositions about life. The human Revery is a solitude in which We compose these propositions, torn by dreams, By the terrible incantations of defeats And by the fear that the defeats and the dreams are one. The whole race is a poet that writes down The eccentric propositions of its fate.

...after a night spent writing poetry, one is almost happy to hear the milkman at the door.

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

Creation is a knack which is empowered by practice, and like almost any skill, it is lost if you don't practice it.

Any life will provide the material for writing, if it is attended to.

I probably have a higher opinion of my writing than the average person, at least when I'm in a good mood, but I don't really think of my plays as only being relevant to a particular month or year.

But what physician has not had patients who don't make any sense at all? To tell the truth, they're our stock-in-trade. We talk and write about the ones we can make sense of.

I don't like to be described as a Southern writer. The danger is, if you're described as a Southern writer, you might be thought of as someone who writes about a picturesque local scene like Uncle Tom's Cabin, Gone With the Wind, something like that.

Foreshadowings of the principles and even of the language of [the infinitesimal] calculus can be found in the writings of Napier, Kepler, Cavalieri, Pascal, Fermat, Wallis, and Barrow. It was Newton's good luck to come at a time when everything was ripe for the discovery, and his ability enabled him to construct almost at once a complete calculus.

The ideas for stories that thronged my brain would not let me rest till I had got rid of them by writing them.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

No one can write a best seller by trying to. He must write with complete sincerity; the clichés that make you laugh, the hackneyed characters, the well-worn situations, the commonplace story that excites your derision, seem neither hackneyed, well worn nor commonplace to him. ... The conclusion is obvious: you cannot write anything that will convince unless you are yourself convinced. The best seller sells because he writes with his heart's blood.

Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel.

A poet, qua poet, has only one political duty, namely, in his own writing to set an example of the correct use of his mother tongue, which is always being corrupted. When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over.