Writing Quotes - Page 513

I think every young cook wants to write a book.

On the subject of the history of the American Revolution, you ask who shall write it? Who can write it? And who will ever be able to write it? Nobody, except merely its external facts... all its councils, designs and discussions having been conducted by Congress [behind] closed doors - and no members, as far as I know, having even made notes of them. These, which are the life and soul of history, must forever be unknown.

A wise man should so write (though in words understood by all men) that wise men only should be able to commend him.

Oblivion is the dark page, whereon Memory writes her light-beam characters, and makes them legible; were it all light, nothing could be read there, any more than if it were all darkness.

I think the best thing about music is that someone could be writing a song that's so personal, and it tells so many other people's story at the same time. It kind of exemplifies that we are all kind of on the same wave[length] - it's amazing how comforting somebody else's story can be, because we have experienced their story in some way or another, and I can totally relate, and I get to feel that feeling and the expression of that emotion. I get to feel like as a listener, that somebody understands me, which is pretty incredible.

I write to make peace with the things I cannot control. I write to create fabric in the world that often appears black and white. I write to meet my ghosts. I write to begin a dialogue. I write to imagine things differently and in imagining things differently perhaps the world will change.

Writing on a contract for a major studio you get the very best.

I know loads of coppers and dealt with them a lot when I was a journalist - coppers are easy to write for; they tend to run on rails.

It is possible to live well with dementia and write best-sellers 'like wot I do.

I love writing in first person more than third. I have to basically suspend my own world. I don't exist. I'm just a conduit. So I can be eight years old. I can be the mother of a kid that you find out certain things I'm not going to say.

It bothers me when people, say, you know, write for, you know, a web publication and get paid little or nothing or, you know, expecting to, like, read the best newspapers in the world and not pay a cent for it. Those newspapers need money in order to operate.

Work with good directors. Without them your play is doomed. At the time of my first play, I thought a good director was someone who liked my play. I was rudely awakened from that fantasy when he directed it as if he loathed it. . . . Work with good actors. A good actor hears the way you (and no one else) write. A good actor makes rewrites easy. A good actor tells you things about your play you didn't know.

I'm of the school 'Write what you know.' You can educate yourself, but the best writing usually comes from the heart.

For those who can do it and who keep their nerve, writing for a living still beats most real, grown-up jobs hands down.

For a creative person there's just as much pleasure in writing an eight-line poem as there is in writing a blockbuster play ... of the old '50s type.

What shouldn't you do if you're a young playwright? Don't bore the audience! I mean, even if you have to resort to totally arbitrary killing on stage, or pointless gunfire, at least it'll catch their attention and keep them awake. Just keep the thing going any way you can.

You know that this vignette and that vignette belong side by side, you know that a certain turn of phrase you've been saving will probably work best within a given section of the narrative. As in a jazz performance, writing lives or dies by what's produced in that moment. But that moment is attended by long preparation.

I suddenly feel a vague pity for all those writers who have to ply their trade from sleepy American suburbs, writing divorce scenes symbolized by the very slow washing of dishes.

Writing itself, if not misunderstood and abused, becomes a way of empowering the writing self. It converts anger and disappointment into deliberate and durable aggression, the writer's main source of energy. It converts sorrow and self-pity into empathy, the writer's main means of relating to otherness. Similarly, his wounded innocence turns into irony, his silliness into wit, his guilt into judgment, his oddness into originality, his perverseness into his stinger.

For me, writing is an experience. It's an exercise in which I want to discover myself by taking my characters to the edges of human experience, to the edges of themselves and then, asking certain questions - about love, what does it mean to love? What's beauty? What is true beauty?

I love to write honest songs that name real people, then get up onstage and live out those emotions in front of 15,000 people.

I would read the Shel Silverstein poems, Dr. Seuss, and I noticed early on that poetry was something that just stuck in my head and I was replaying those rhymes and try to think of my own. In English, the only thing I wanted to do was poetry and all the other kids were like, "Oh, man. We have to write poems again?" and I would have a three-page long poem. I won a national poetry contest when I was in fourth grade for a poem called "Monster In My Closet.

One of my big goals as a human being is to continue to write what's really happening to me, even if it's a tough pill to swallow for people around me.... I do fear that if I ever were to have someone in my life who mattered, I would second-guess every one of my lyrics.

I'd love to collaborate and write a song with Will Gallagher from Oasis. I think he's a great songwriter.

Everyone likes to stereotype things or write them off as not that serious or "this is just a phase," especially when you're that young. The music was never a phase, but the wardrobe was certainly a phase, so I think that may have overshadowed the music in the beginning, for sure. I was so outrageous.