Writing Quotes - Page 464

In writing I search for believability, simplicity, and emotional impact.

While my chosen form of story-writing is obviously a special and perhaps a narrow one, it is none the less a persistent and permanent type of expression, as old as literature itself. There will always be a certain small percentage of persons who feel a burning curiosity about unknown outer space, and a burning desire to escape from the prison-house of the known and the real into those enchanted lands of incredible adventure and infinite possibilities which dreams open up to us, and which things like deep woods, fantastic urban towers, and flaming sunsets momentarily suggest.

After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.

A critic is a man who writes about things he doesn't like.

The mistake that is made always runs the other way. Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads, and an appetite for more. This assumption is a folly.

I know already the music I will write. But the words? I have not yet decided.

I think after doing Push and Shove and having it not be successful, I lost a lot of confidence. Songwriting, for me, has always been traumatic, and I've always made all these excuses. But I've realized that you have to just accept that it was a gift: "I don't know where it came from, I don't know how I did it, but I did write all those songs, and I gotta do it again."

I suppose directing on set is the most fun because it's a good crack and you feel you're on the battlefield whereas writing is a fairly solitary undertaking.

I can be completely indulgent and spend as many hours and days or weeks as I like on one thing. Writing music and sitting in my studio, just pottering with ideas, it's a lot more personal and creative for me, I don't feel restricted.

Enchantment can be done with writing but I think enchantment is basically a prospective or an operating system for life. That you can enchant a person who is assigning your airplane seat, your hotel room, your waiter, your waitress.

After a while, you start to realize that you should write a book you would want to read. I try to write a book I would enjoy.

My writing, such as it is, grows out of my sense of discolation, I mean, dislocation. Having lost my place, I write to find my place, or to find once again that I have lost my place.

One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table.

Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.

It is the narrow, hidden tracks that lead back to our lost homeland, what contains the solution to the last mysteries is not the ugly scar that life's rasp leaves on us, but the fine, almost invisible writing that is engraved on our body.

I was assigned to the Waffen-SS but was never involved in any crime. Besides, I always felt the need to write about my experiences in a larger context one day. This has only developed recently, now that I have overcome my inner aversion to writing an autobiography in the first place, specifically one having to do with my younger years.

I live in London and I am a British subject, although I do write in Spanish, of course

I am the only British writer who writes in Spanish

Titles are not only important, they are essential for me. I cannot write without a title

American literature had always considered writing a very serious matter

I think all writing is done through memory

I write by ear. I tried writing with the typewriter, but I found it too unwieldy

To write an autobiography of Groucho Marx would be as asinine as to read an autobiography of Groucho Marx.

As I write, Johnny Rotten's first moments in "Anarchy in the U.K." - a rolling earthquake of a laugh, a buried shout, then hoary words somehow stripped of all claptrap and set down in the city streets - I AM AN ANTICHRIST - Remain as powerful as anything I know. Listening to the record today - listening to the way Johnny Rotten tears at his lines, and then hurls the pieces at the world; recalling the all-consuming smile he produced as he sang - my back stiffens; I pull away even as my scalp begins to sweat.

Sometimes I think of writing as becoming this antenna that picks up the vibrations all around me in order to find out how and where next I'll be steered.