Writing Quotes - Page 457

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

What I don't write is as important as what I write.

I do like a song that can look good on a page without even being sung. I edit and edit and edit.

My mom would always say this thing about writing - and I've taken it into account in a lot of things in my life - which is just, "Make it shorter." Figure out what you are truly saying, whittle it down to the essence, then say that.

I do not believe in pure idioms. I think there is naturally a desire, for whoever speaks or writes, to sign in an idiomatic, irreplaceable manner.

During the fifteen or twenty years in which I tried - it was not always easy with publishers, newspapers, etc. - to forbid photographs, it was not at all in order to mark a sort of blank, absence, or disappearance of the image; it was because the code that dominates at once the production of these images, the framing they are made to undergo, the social implications (showing the writer's head framed in front his bookshelves, the whole scenario) seemed to me to be, first of all, terribly boring, but also contrary to what I am trying to write and to work on.

Let us face a pluralistic world in which there are no universal churches, no single remedy for all diseases, no one way to teach or write or sing, no magic diet, no world poets, and no chosen races, but only the wretched and wonderfully diversified human race.

When things aren't working out, we have a tendency to say, 'Go do other things,' but you shouldn't do other things. You need to stay at your desk and continue to try to write. You need to insist on it.

I think it's important to remember that writing is a gift and our stories are gifts to ourselves and to the world and sometimes giving isn't always the easiest thing to do but it comes back.

I wanted to write it long before I wrote Every Night, Josephine! I'd been thinking about it a long time.

Philanthropy is no longer about writing a check for $10,000 to the opera.

I feel successful when the writing goes well. This lasts five minutes. Once, when I was number one on the bestseller list, I also felt successful. That lasted three minutes.

There must be something unique about man because otherwise, evidently, the ducks would be lecturing about Konrad Lorenz, and the rats would be writing papers about B. F. Skinner.

Well, as an artist, I think that Elvis's generosity to me he always talked very highly about me, he always spoke very highly about my work and singing and my writing.

Where was Paris Hilton a year ago? She's a fabulous character to write about.

I am still shocking people today, and I don't know why. Is it because I'm a woman talking about sex and men? One magazine said that no one writes sex in the back of a Bentley better than Jackie Collins.

I write synopses after the book is completed. I can't write it beforehand, because I don't know what the book's about. I invent something for my publisher because he asks for one, but the final book ends up very differently.

I want to write a film. I need to think of the right idea and focus on that; I love writing.

But I'm so slow on it because I find it terribly hard writing blind on computers. The computer speaks to me, but it's just so slow, I'm so terribly slow using it.

Since I didn't spend a great amount of time on writing the lyrics, some people would argue that they're too vague or simplistic, but I think it's kind of good. I wouldn't say they're all stream of consciousness, but they're not necessarily overwrought.

I write the poems first, with only a few exceptions for odd reasons, where I'm given the illustration first.

When I began writing, I didn't read any other children's poets... I didn't want to be influenced until I'd found my own voice. Now I read them all.

My style is personal, my style of writing is personal, and I believe in that. I believe what comes out of me is an individual thing, and that's why I, I believe in the individual.

Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind.

Write in recollection and amazement for yourself.