Writing Quotes - Page 455

Pick a better verb. Most people use twenty verbs to describe everything from a run in their stocking to the explosion of an A-bomb.

Writing mirrors the interior self. You know, any book is like the perfect blueprint of the psyche of the author.

The human desire to know why is as powerful as the desire to know what happened next, and it is a desire of a higher order.

If to live is to progress, if you are lucky, from foolishness to wisdom, then to write novels is to broadcast the various stages of your foolishness.

Listen to advice. You don't know how many writer's conferences I've taught at where at least half the audience fights all the conventions of the field.

The Piano Lesson' is very sophisticated, easily the most adult or complex material I've attempted. It's the first film I've written that has a proper story, and it was a big struggle for me to write. It meant I had to admit the power of narrative.

And if I had not a letter to write myself, I might sit by you and admire the evenness of your writing, as another young lady once did. But I have an aunt too, who must not be longer neglected.

The very word woman in the writings of the church fathers stood for the basest of temptations... As women were lowered in the moral scale because of their identification with her at the very bottom of the pit, so they cannot rise themselves save as they succeed in lifting her with whose sins they are weighed.

I'll never sing something that I've never been through. So even if I didn't write it, I have to have at least experienced it.

Nature has decreed that for what men suffer by having to shave, be killed in battle, and eat the legs of chickens, women make amends by housekeeping, childbirth, and writing all the letters for both of them.

Advertising isnt just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought. At every company that sells ads, a significant portion of their engineering team spends their day tuning data mining, writing better code to collect all your personal data.

Arizona, our beautiful state, was built on mining. Copper is huge here, and now uranium. And then we have the federal government coming in, writing all these rules and regulations and telling us that we can't do this and we can't do that. We need concise, clear answers.

Of course, all of the software I write runs on Linux; that's the beauty of standards, and of cross-platform code. I don't have to run your OS, and you don't have to run mine, and we can use the same applications anyway!

I'm more honest in my lyrics than I am in anything else. It's where I feel the most safe to express myself. I write about growing up, my family, Maddie and getting pregnant. If I've lived it, why wouldn't I talk about it? I guess that's been the coolest thing - realizing that it's OK to just be myself and really tell my story.

Whenever I started writing music, it just naturally led itself there. As I started to tell my story, it's where my home was. It's just a very natural choice.

I've always loved improvising. That's how I write songs. Creativity has an improvised element to it.

Songs are like myths. Myths are useful because they allow you to cast yourself and your life and your own experience. And for some people, 'Fire and Rain' speaks to them in that way.

Songwriting is too mysterious and uncontrolled a process for me to direct it towards any one thing.

In 1957, I decided: write or perish.

The secret of force in writing lies not so much in the pedigree of nouns and adjectives and verbs, as in having something that you believe in to say, and making the parts of speech vividly conscious of it.

I wrote for years before I was ever published, and I don't think I could ever stop. That said, I was also a veterinarian before I sold my first book, and I still volunteer my time to help with animal welfare causes. So that is a career I would be happy to return to - while still secretly writing strange stories back in my doctor's office.

The turning point was when I hit my 30th birthday. I thought, if really want to write, it's time to start. I picked up the book How to Write a Novel in 90 Days. The author said to just write three pages a day, and I figured, I can do this. I never got past Page 3 of that book.

I’ve been an investigative reporter for a long time, and almost always, the government says that [‘you can’t publish that because of the national security risk’] when you write a story. And then they can never back it up. They say that about everything. And it’s like the boy who cried wolf. It’s getting old.

[in 1998] I know my political ideas affect what I write but I've tried to follow the facts wherever they land. Every topic I've written about begins as a question. How do police departments behave? Why do bureaucracies function the way they do? What moral intuitions do people have? How do courts make their decisions? What do blacks want from the political system? I can honestly say I didn't know the answers to those questions when I began looking into them.

I did know that the book would end with a mind-boggling trial, but I didn't know exactly how it would turn out. I like a little suspense when I am writing, too.