Writing Quotes - Page 399

I don't feel any kind of a responsibility (other than to myself) to write "weighty" lyrics. In fact I sometimes wish I could learn to write in a simpler form, to be more direct and I'm going to be experimenting with this.

The older I grow the more sharply I mistrust words. So few of them have any meaning left. It is impossible to write one sentence in which every word has the bareness and hardness of bones, the reality of the skeleton.

I just know that I love to write songs, and I have for a long time.

The focus of my playing is the groove, and every time I find a new rhythm, I find I can write a bunch of new songs. Learning how to dance, or drum, or to swing my body in a new way is the fundamental way I find a new riff. Because when you learn to swing your body in a new way, you begin to swing with your instrument differently.

You don’t need help to write a song. You just need to get over this experience that bummed you out so bad. The relationship you were in is over, it was over a long time ago, and you need to move on.

I'm writing an unauthorized autobiography.

Next morning I went over to Paul’s for coffee and told him I had finished. “Good for you,” he said without looking up. “Start the next one today.

Unfortunately, creative people are at their most creative when writing their autobiographies.

One nice thing about putting the thing away for a couple of months before looking at it is that you start appreciate your own wit. Of course, this can be carried too far. But it's kind of cool when you crack up a piece of writing, and then realize you wrote it. I recommend this feeling.

Because here’s the thing: No matter how much one tells stories of magical beasts or impossible worlds, in the end, it is always the world of here and now one is writing about. The better one understands that world, the more powerful the stories will be.

I dont really have an office or anything, and I like to have to move location every two hours. So I just kind of write in a park, on a bench, in the library, in a cafe, back to the library, that kind of thing.

I think there are people out there writing original bluegrass songs, but it's hard to get them out on the air.

The real joy is in constructing a sentence. But I see myself as an actor first because writing is what you do when you are ready and acting is what you do when someone else is ready.

Writing a novel- actually picking the words and filling in paragraphs- is a tremendous pain in the ass. Now that TV's so good and the Internet is an endless forest of distraction, it's damn near impossible. That should be taken into account when ranking the all-time greats. Somebody like Charles Dickens, for example, who had nothing better to do except eat mutton and attend public hangings, should get very little credit.

Poetry is the hardest thing that there is. It fascinates me, so I want to write more of it.

Inspiration comes from the act of writing.

When you're writing you're affected by everything that's going on around you.

I don't feel that I have to control every aspect of things that I appear in. You learn a lot performing someone else's writing.

Art arises from loss. I wish this weren't the case. I wish that every time I met a new woman and she rocked my world, I was inspired to write my ass off. But that is not what happens. What happens is we lie around in bed eating chocolate and screwing. Art is what happens when things don't work out, when you're licking your wounds. Art is, to a larger extent than people would like to think, a productive licking of the wounds.

At first I was blogging everyday, but I don't do that anymore. It varies; sometimes I'll write these little essays and other times political commentaries. Other times it'll just be new work that I'm doing.

A song is such a short form ... that 'the slightest flaw seems like a mountain.' And so every song needs to be revised 'til it's close to perfection... But achieving perfection takes a lot of energy.

Every writer I've ever spoken to feels fraudulent in some way or other.

Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself - it is the occurring which is difficult.

Teasing out the way the world might look through another's eyes is what makes the creative process so fascinating and enjoyable.

If you can remember all the accessories that go with your best outfit, the contents of your purse, the starting lineup of the New York Yankees or the Houston Oilers, or what label "Hang On Sloopy" by The McCoys was on, you are capable of remembering the differences between a gerund (verb form used as a noun) and a participle (verb form used as an adjective).