Writing Quotes - Page 503

Well, one of the things I discovered in the course of looking back and writing about what I saw in my memory is that I was a closely observant person long before I became a reporter.

Why are some things easier to write than say?

I write to be recorder, observer, participant, and sometimes, even judge. I want to engage the world as I see it with my whole self - all of those different aspects of it.

The actual materials are important. A book at the nightstand is important - a light you can get at - or a flashlight as Kerouac had a brakeman's latern.

Love your material. Nothing frightens the inner critic more than the writer who loves her work. The writer who is enamored of her material forgets all about censoring herself. She doesn't stop to wonder if her book is any good, or who will publish it, or what people will think. She writes in a trance, losing track of time, hearing only her characters in her head.

I grew up in an environment of jokes and sarcasm and puns. I talk that way, so I write that way.

Writers write about what worries them.

A lot of times students will come up to me and say, "Well, I can't write because I don't know what I think about such-and-such." And I say, "That's why you have to write." You don't wait until you know, because then who cares - it's static.

Sometimes I wish the writing and drawing were more integrated.

I started out as a poet. I've always been a poet since I was 7 or 8. And so I feel myself to be fundamentally a poet who got into writing novels.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence - as it saves most writers who live in 'interesting' oppressive times and are not afflicted by personal immunity.

Sometimes, reading a blog, which I do infrequently, I see that generations of Americans have been wilfully crippled, and can no longer spell or write a sentence.

The deep, personal material of the latter half of your life is your children. You can write about your parents when they're gone, but your children are still going to be here, and you're going to want them to come and visit you in the nursing home.

Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.

I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist

I'm much faster now. When you only have a certain amount of time to write, after a while you learn to use your time well or you stop writing

When I write for teens, I feel I can cut through everything and get to the bare bones. I can get straight into the emotional world of the character.

Every fairy tale had a bloody lining. Every one had teeth and claws.

After a while, the characters I'm writing begin to feel real to me. That's when I know I'm heading in the right direction

I try to write each piece in the language of the piece, so that I'm not using the same language from piece to piece. I may be using ten or twenty languages. That multiplicity of language and the use of words is African in tradition. And black writers have definitely taken that up and taken it in. It's like speaking in tongues. It may sound like gibberish to somebody, but you know it's a tongue of some kind. Black people have this. We have the ability as a race to speak in tongues, to dream in tongues, to love in tongues.

Ten censure wrong for one who writes amiss.

And write about it, Goddess, and about it!

I definitely in filmmaking more and more find writing and directing a means to harvest material for editing. It's all about editing.

What is this you write- 'Come home? Surely now, in our terrible dearth of workers, it is not the time for any one to desert his post. Send us only our first twenty men and I may be tempted to come to help you to find the second twenty.

I actually write my own music whenever I have a chance. I play guitar and sing.