Writing Quotes - Page 421

Beginning with a critique of my own limbs, which she said, justly enough, were nothing to write home about, this girl went on to dissect my manners, morals, intellect, general physique, and method of eating asparagus with such acerbity that by the time she had finished the best you could say of Bertram was that, so far as was known, he had never actually committed murder or set fire to an orphan asylum.

Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.

I am fifty years old and I have never known what it is to love. I can write those words, know them to be true, but feel only the regret that a tone-deaf man must feel because he can't appreicate music, a regret less keen because it is for something never known, not for something lost.

I'd hate to be a songwriter starting a career today...Al Stanton walked in one day and said, 'Otis, I've got an idea. Why don't you write a song called "All Shook Up"?' Two days later I brought the song in and said, 'Look, man, I did something with it.'

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.

Actions are the first tragedy in life, words are the second. Words are perhaps the worst. Words are merciless. . .

Biography lends to death a new terror.

Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face. It cannot be concealed.

The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.

I watched TV religiously when I was a kid, but nowadays - with the Internet - there's so many people writing about TV on the Internet, that everything's sort of under a magnifying glass.

If I write a paragraph and I don't get a certain lift from it, if I don't feel connected to it emotionally, then it's dead to me. When I'm reading other fiction writers, if I don't get any emotional investment from the writer, if it's just intellectual or clever - you know, most writing that passes as deep is just clever - I don't feel any connection.

Writer’s block is my unconscious mind telling me that something I’ve just written is either unbelievable or unimportant to me, and I solve it by going back and reinventing some part of what I’ve already written so that when I write it again, it is believable and interesting to me. Then I can go on. Writer’s block is never solved by forcing oneself to “write through it,” because you haven’t solved the problem that caused your unconscious mind to rebel against the story, so it still won’t work – for you or for the reader.

Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day.

There is no society that does not highly value fictional storytelling. Ever.

If someone considers the prophetic writings with all the diligence and reverence they are worth, while he reads and examines with great care, it is certain that in that very act he will be struck in his mind and senses by some more divine breath and will recognize that the books he reads have not been produced in a human way, but are words of God.

I cry, sometimes, because I'm not 20 years younger, and I'm not healthy. But if I were, I would even sacrifice my writing to enter politics.

When you start out on a project as an actor, you know, you approach the character from the standpoint of maybe writing a list - even if it's a mental list that you make - of the adjectives that the character has or that character possesses.

Writing is the beast unto itself.

Now I'm doing a film festival for kids and writing a script about a kidnapped journalist in Afghanistan.

Write how you want, the critic shall show the world you could have written better.

I like men who paint or write or do something creative.

Give me coffee! I'm going to write!

Most of us don't have to worry about being shot of we poke our noses outside. So we are comfortable, but the people I'm writing about are definitely not comfortable, and being shot while they're still inside is a good possibility.

No one was going to stop me from writing and no one had to really guide me towards science fiction. It was natural, really, that I would take that interest.