Writing Quotes - Page 496

No black woman writer in this culture can write "too much". Indeed, no woman writer can write "too much"...No woman has ever written enough.

If we are ever to construct a feminist movement that is not based on the premise that men and women are always at war with one another, then we must be willing to acknowledge the appropriateness of complex critical responses to writing by men even if it is sexist. Clearly women can learn from writers whose work is sexist, even be inspired by it, because sexism may be simply one dimension of that work. Concurrently fiercely critiquing the sexism does not mean that one does not value the work.

I just go in the studio and write on the spot and see what comes out.

You have to be very brave in that first writing session.

You can get stale writing with each other for a while.

Probably most successful songwriters have an innate songwriting ability.

I stay glued to my piano and my work. I don't look up. I write, I produce, I do the next project, I do my job. I don't look up, and I try to be kind. I try to be kind to people. That's what I do.

The writer works on the inside and the critic works on the outside. I don't know what it looks like on the outside, sometimes. It's not that I'm not interested-it's not where I live. I live inside the story.

I'll tell you why I like writing: it's just jumping into a pool. I get myself into a kind of trance. I engage the world, but it's also wonderful to just escape. I try to find the purities out of the confusion. It's pretty old-fashioned, but it's fun.

I wouldn't buy somebody's album on a dare if they called him a musician's musician. I don't write to be a writer's writer. I don't want to be like the little-magazine writer.

I was always kind of florid. And full of rhetoric. That was my flaw. My whole time writing, I've had to work against that because it can be a wrecking posture.

I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning to the end.

Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence.

If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.

The only way to do it is to do it: by writing, writing, writing.

It is harrowing for me to try to teach 20-year-old students, who earnestly want to improve their writing. The best I can think to tell them is: Quit smoking, and observe posted speed limits. This will improve your odds of getting old enough to be wise.

I concentrate on character, theme, language, structure, voice. It actually surprises me that no matter what I write, people declare it "intently political." I'm just writing about the world I know, as it is. Wounds and griefs included.

A catless writer is almost inconceivable. It's a perverse taste, really, since it would be easier to write with a herd of buffalo in the room than even one cat; they make nests in the notes and bite the end of the pen and walk on the typewriter keys.

Like many other women, I could not understand why every man who changed a diaper has felt impelled, in recent years, to write a book about it.

If you're reading something from a Nobel Prize-winning physicist next to some guy in his underwear writing in his basement, or his mom's basement, on text, it looks like it's equally plausible.

Even monarchs have need of authors, and fear their pens more than ugly women the painter's pencil.

One has to see oneself through one's actions, works, and mind. Knowing the Self by the self is not as easy as writing that line. A #‎ yogi sees things in every movement he makes, maybe when practicing, maybe when teaching, or maybe when talking to people. You should have courage in your convictions and pursue what is dear to you all these years.

If someone writes something shitty and you actually address them, most of the time they're just like, "Oh, I'm sorry. I'm a big fan." And they're really nice people. When you're on the Internet, it's people's first instinct to just go after people.

I tend to approach giving interviews with the same sense of circumspection and restraint as I approach my writing. That is to say, virtually none. When asked what I made of blogs like my own, blogs written by parents about their children, I said, 'A blog like this is narcissism in its most obscene flowering.'

In a sense, my grandmother was living in the Iron Age. There was no system of writing among the nomads. Metal artifacts were rare and precious.... The first time she saw a white person my grandmother was in her thirties: she thought this person's skin had burned off.