Writing Quotes - Page 518

When a man publishes a book, there are so many stupid things said that he declares he'll never do it again. The praise is almost always worse than the criticism.

My career means, if you're a non-Indian writing about Indians, at least there's one Indian in your rearview mirror.

If you really want to know yourself, start by writing a book.

When I am gone what will you do? Who will write and draw for you? Someone smarter--someone new? Someone better--maybe YOU!

Everyone is so different. I sometimes wish I wrote in a different way. You know, that feeling of: So-and-so writes slowly, if only I wrote slowly.

It's really such a personal journey, making a record, but even more so writing the songs.

I am in between. Trying to write to be understood by those who matter to me, yet also trying to push my mind with ideas beyond the everyday. It is another borderland I inhabit. Not quite here nor there. On good days I feel I am a bridge. On bad days I just feel alone.

I find that, for me, it is this concept of borrowed or built life, life on loan, that gets me writing. It's similar to speaking about literature. I like it, and then I don't like it. It has such an inherent vein of pretention, because you're not speaking about real things. There's a literary pretentiousness made of speaking and spending so much time on unreal persons. And it seems, now, impossible to create an unpretentious, totally organic character.

I have withdrawn not only from men, but from affairs, especially my own affairs; I am working for later generations, writing down some ideas that may be of assistance to them.

One of the reasons that any person writes anything is to try and keep his own sanity together.

I would definitely write to the kid that I was before, to embrace the moment. I think that often times when you're coming of age or growing up you look forward and you work really hard instead of sitting back and relaxing and enjoying the moment.

The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful...

Write whatever you like!

The main thing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. Take off from here.

I used to be a pre-industrial writer: thousands of words in a spurt and then a few days off. But as I get older, I've switched to a mode best described as 'slow and steady wins the race.' Basically, I write during the same four hours every day, after breakfast and the all-important coffee, generally in the same room and wearing the same pajamas.

But at this phase of my life, I want to write and not have to think about whether a song is going to be a hit. I want to explore the music that inspires me, and I don't want to ape myself.

The movies that work are the ones in which somebody very smart figured out how to take all the thematic material, all the character material, all the filigree, all the beautiful writing, and put it into a story.

If you write your own tools, you can sort of see new things, design new things.

The writer cannot make the seas of distraction stand still, but he [or she] can at times come between the madly distracted and the distractions.

I am deeply moved when I write. I get turned on by it. I've never used any drugs for stimulation. I don't use words loosely. When I'm working and the right word comes, there is an answering resonance within me. There is also a hardness of intention that goes with it. There is no idleness in it.

Being in L.A., it was really hard to find a country writer and producer. I eventually - years of searching - found this guy, Dan Franklin. He's an incredible musician and producer. We write so well together... It's been a really cool experience.

A book is not only written - after it's finished it starts writing you, the writer. You become its notebook, its sheet of paper on which it forces you to think and rethink your original ideas, your topics, your research, actually everything.

I know how to write. So I am not totally at the mercy of filmmakers, but it's not a bad point.

[On the New Testament:] I ... must enter my protest against the false translation of some passages by the men who did that work, and against the perverted interpretation by the men who undertook to write commentaries thereon. I am inclined to think, when we [women] are admitted to the honor of studying Greek and Hebrew, we shall produce some various readings of the Bible a little different from those we now have.

I write music all the time. When I talk about having writer's block, it's more to do with lyrics than anything else