Writing Quotes - Page 434

I've always thought that writing isn't really that hard. It's having a good idea that's hard.

I do see an interest in writing for Twitter. While publishers still do love the novel and people do still like to sink into one, the very quick form is appealing because of the pace of life.

To observe the world carefully, to write a lot and often, on a schedule if necessary, to use the dictionary a lot, to look up word origins, to analyze closely the work of writers you admire, to read not only contemporaries but writers of the past, to learn at least one foreign language, to live an interesting life outside of writing.

The translator ... Peculiar outcast, ghost in the world of literature, recreating in another form something already created, creating and not creating, writing words that are his own and not his own, writing a work not original to him, composing with utmost pains and without recognition of his pains or the fact that the composition really is his own.

I wanted to write about the third world and had the opportunity to go live in the trenches, so to speak.

When I'm writing a song, it's just me and the songwriters. Then when the song is done, there are publishers that hear it, then people in my management, then my wife and my boys and my friends, and if they're all lovin' it, it's kind of withstanding all the criticism I need.

Mozart wrote so many works in his thirty-five years that it would take a lifetime just to write out the notes. We literally do not know how he did it.

The creative act is like writing a letter. A letter is a project; you don't sit down to write a letter unless you know what you want to say and to whom you want to say it.

This dilettantish inability to comprehend the essential issues of the conduct of production affairs is not only manifested in the writings of Marx and Engels. It permeates no less the contributions of contemporary pseudo-economics.

I don't keep my books around... they would embarrass me. When I finish writing my books, I kick them in the belly, and have done with them.

Feeling intimidated is a good sign. Writing from a place of safety produces stuff that is at best dull and at worst dishonest.

I regard a love for poetry as one of the most needful and helpful elements in the life-outfit of a human being. It was the greatest of blessings to me, in the long days of toil to which I was shut in much earlier than most young girls are, that the poetry I held in my memory breathed its enchanted atmosphere through me and around me, and touched even dull drudgery with its sunshine.

Basically, I just want to make movies and maybe even produce TV later down the line, do some writing, maybe a tour with my music. And start a family! That's really important to me.

In a moment, when I'm ready, I will turn off this computer and that will be it. This letter will be finished. A part of me doesn't want to stop writing to you, but I need to. For both of us.

Theres so many other things to write about than unrequited love.

"Light Over Water" is the longest piece I have ever composed. It is a landmark in my personal struggle to create large forms. I feel that it is by and large a formally successful work, though I was constrained to write a piece at least fifty minutes long, and there are some dead spots in the music where I think I was simply marking time. However, I think when the dance is in motion, the formal problem is nonexistent.

I wanted to play piano, and that slid quickly into writing - it wasn't enough to play other people's notes: I had to write notes too.

The world is changing from day to day; it is high time for our writers to take off their masks, look frankly, keenly, and boldly at life, and write about real flesh and blood. It is high time for a brand-new arena for literature, high time for some bold fighters to charge headlong into battle!

What is it that really makes us, us? It's our collective intelligence. It's our ability to write things down, our language and our consciousness.

I could write an entertaining novel about rejection slips, but I fear it would be overly long.

It is not possible, for a poet, writing in any language, to protect himself from the tragic elements in human life.... [ellipsis in source] Illness, old age, and death--subjects as ancient as humanity--these are the subjects that the poet must speak of very nearly from the first moment that he begins to speak.

Diminished circumstances had no effect on his sense of what was honorable: after The Spectator sent him a check for a piece it had accepted but was unable to run for a lack of space, he refused to write for the magazine again.

The dancer becomes the dance. And I am the writing.

I really learned how to write from Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Trollope, and de Maupassant.

At the end of the day you do have to write a short novel beforehand, called a script, before you can make a movie.