Writing Quotes - Page 504

Cockburn's personal history links him to the politics of the Communist Party, and there are still moments in his writing - debating the number of people estimated to have perished in Stalin's gulags, claiming that 'the Brezhnev years were a Golden Age for the Soviet working class', when aspects of his father's convictions can be glimpsed.

Writing original songs is much, much harder (I think) because you only have yourself to conjure up EVERY single moment a listener is going to hear. It's a craft that goes directly from your brain to their ears. You can never be sure that what you're writing is gonna be good enough to keep a listener engaged and truly experience something. It's a shot in the dark.

Shakespeare, who is probably the greatest writer and poet of the English language, lived in a time that was politically very conservative and it's reflected in his writings.

If you're writing anything decent, it's in you, it's your spirit coming out. If it's not an expression of how a person genuinely feels, then it's not a good song done with any conviction.

For me writing and acting all comes out of the same place, a compulsion to review and connect to something. For me they are more similar than different.

I live making comics. Comics is an industrial art but less suffering, because comics are for young people who are more adventurous. I do that. I live off comics, and then I write books, but when you want movies, you cannot make movies without money.

I don't see myself as a movie maker only. When I can do a picture, I do. But I don't work like a business, in pictures. I am not obliged to make one picture after the other in order to live. I write books, I write for comic books, I give lectures... I live. And when the opportunity comes to do a picture, I do a picture.

All questions of the Law are to be decided only by appeal to my writings, each for himself

There are people who would rather choke than go see my movies. They write me letters all the time.

I know very dimly when I start what's going to happen. I just have a very general idea, and then the thing develops as I write.

It would be so nice to write songs that end up being timeless.

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

A writer cannot put himself today in service of those who make history; he is at the service of those who suffer it.

It is immoral not to tell.

I know the Chicago media will write a lot of bad things, but they'll write a lot of good things too. I can live with that. In Cleveland, all I got was negative press.

The thing I always default to is that I'll always be here to write songs.

When I start writing songs and it turns into an overly belabored intellectual process, I just throw it out.

I don't think there's really any difference between art - or writing, or music - and magic. And I particularly draw the link between magic and writing. I think that they are profoundly connected.

Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?

There even are places where English completely disappears. In America, they haven't used it for years! Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?

I read a lot. I spend of lot time thinking. It actually looks like I'm doing nothing, but... hanging out with clever and interesting people is a must if you're writing comedy, like hanging out with a good bass player when you're a drummer.

I'm crushed by the responsibility of writing a satirical book.

If I were to write anything at all, it would turn out to be nothing but talk about movies. In other words, take 'myself,' subtract 'movies,' and the result is 'zero.'

I wanted to try to write songs on the piano to get a different flavor.

Large meadows are lovely for picnics and romping, but they are for the lighter feelings. Meadows do not make me want to write.