Writing Quotes - Page 532

I had never understood quite so clearly the effective power of Jane Jacob's writing - no, her clear-headed observation - as I did reading “What We See”. Maybe that's really the point of writing. That if you take the time to look, to really observe, then you see what is happening, and, with the clarity of that vision, you can act to save neighborhoods.

In commercial fiction especially, everything in the story usually contributes directly to the plot The shorter the story, the truer this is

Many an author will speak of writing, in his best work, more than he actually knows.

The point of writing my name to you is that I see who you are, you see who I am... and that's what it's about.

a writer doesn't only need the time when he's actually writing - he or she has got to have time to think and time just to let things work out. Nothing is worse for this than society. Nothing is worse for this than the abrasive, if enjoyable, effect of other people.

Writing is always a voyage of discovery.

By all means write new songs. Each generation must do that. But to neglect the church's original hymnbook is, to put it bluntly, crazy

The process of writing a poem represents work done on the self of the poet, in order to make form.

One thing I ask you to do, you people who have the pen in your hand, allow God to use you so that you never write anything that will destroy, that will hurt, but always take the trouble to write something beautiful, to help the people to see better, to love better, to come closer... to each other.

There is nothing that one can say about acting, writing, producing or directing that cannot be revoked in the next breath. Nothing is immutable. The logic of one year is a folly of the next.

I knew what I wanted to do when I set out. I knew that I wanted to write a book that told the story, obviously. I wanted it be comedy first, because I felt like there already had been childhood druggy stories that were very serious, and I felt that the unique thing here was that I was a comic and I could tell the story with some levity, and I have been laughing at these stories my whole life.

So in that way, fame has become a weirder thing to go after, but the thing about me is I've never been after fame. That sounds cliché, but it's true. I think fame sounds uncomfortable to me, but being able to like write this book and make my living doing very exciting, creative stuff sounds really amazing. It has been really amazing.

There was a time when hip-hop was its own musical principle, aside from sampling. Like the entire Wild Style break is instrumental. Kurtis Blow's earliest stuff was studio musicians playing. Whodini had a real clear sound, things like "five minutes of funk," stuff that you could write really beautiful, lush string and horn arrangements around, stuff that was just music.

When you're writing a story or an actor playing a role, you should never think of your characters as heroes or villains. You have to think of them as people first.

I'm not one who can write out a speech and remember all the names of the people that you need to thank because you need to thank all of those people.

I obviously prefer writing novels but I take my journalism very seriously, and I enjoy doing it between novels. It gives me an opportunity to move in the outside world.

I'm blissfully not writing anything. Just doing a lot of reading and hopefully some thinking as well.

I feel like women very often do write differently than men, but women write things that men can't write.

I think we do live in a very specialized society, where once you think about somebody as one thing, it's hard to change that. But I do a lot of things. I act, I write, I sing.

Rohini Mohan read. While she did, I sketched her. She writes with such beauty and violence, and it seemed like the best way to listen was to really watch her, in the way that only drawing someone lets me do.

If someone writes a nice review of my record, I feel like I should take them out to dinner or go over and clean their apartment.

I guess the most emotional part is when I have that moment when I end up writing something that I really, really love. So not only is there the emotional connection with the music that's being created, but there's also the magic of the fact that you're essentially creating something from nothing.

I'm like a bad musical cliche because I bring my guitar on the road and try to write songs in hotel rooms.

I find interesting characters or lessons that resonate with people and sometimes I write about them in the sports pages, sometimes I write them in a column, sometimes in a novel, sometimes a play or sometimes in nonfiction. But at the core I always say to myself, 'Is there a story here? Is this something people want to read?'

I had a very high-grade publisher tell me I was incapable of writing a memoir.