Writing Quotes - Page 533

I want my music to be something that people use in order to access parts of themselves. So in that sense, every piece I write is about all emotions at once, about the lines in between. It's never only about one thing or another. It's emotionally getting at those things that we can't really describe - things for which we don't have labels. So yes, it's about something, and it has a use. It's neither about nothing nor about something concrete - it's about what you bring to it as a listener.

When I write, I wear earplugs. I don't want to be self-conscious. I don't want to be thinking about the fact that I'm thinking about it. I just want to be in it. It's one element of hypnosis.

With the 'iCarly' soundtrack, I didn't get to write any of the songs. I just picked songs that meant a lot to me that I really liked.

I do have a journal, that I write all my thoughts in every day. So that's kind of something. I also have a burn box where I write secrets down and put it in a box.

I've had journals ever since I was really little. Sometimes I write poems and stuff, but for the most part I write down what happens to me during the day that I don't want to forget. So I have books filled with little things like that.

Sometimes I will tweet things without an audience in mind at all, just because I want to say something that I don't feel I can say otherwise. Those tweets have a specific sense of desperation to them, because I write them when I feel like I don't have anyone else to talk to - as if Twitter is the only thing that will accept my insanely inappropriate thoughts without judgement.

I often think of a poem as a door that opens into a room where I want to go.

The novelist's ambition is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not say.

My writing is progressing slowly, but at least it's moving forward. I'm sure that's the case. The only problem is that I'm never absolutely certain that what I've written is any good.

Dreamt I died in Chicago next weekend (heart attack in my sleep). Need to write my will today.

Seventy percent of what I write, I throw out. I can write very easily, but writing original things is the hard bit.

I fell asleep at my desk many times. This was when working on events—virtually every one I’ve done in the last 5 years. I was not confronting the writing of speeches. In fact, I was not wanting to confront what I was doing at the time—being irresponsible... I am now known for falling asleep. This has happened 50 times in the last 5 years and probably 20 times at my desk in the last 2 years.

My thumbprint is on every single thing that happens with Hellboy. It was the hardest thing I ever had to do professionally, letting someone else draw the main Hellboy comic. He's so much mine. But I still have no intention of ever handing over the writing of the main Hellboy comic to someone else. That character is my baby.

I don't think the press are vindictive. They can write what they want

I write songs to turn myself into something else. And then I become that, and I want to become something else.

The major accomplishment of analyzing illiteracy so far has been the listing of symptoms: the decrease in functional literacy; a general degradation of writing skills and reading comprehension; an alarming increase of packaged language (cliches used in speeches, canned messages); and a general tendency to substitute visual media (especially television and video) for written language.

For me alone Don Quixote was born and I for him. His was the power of action, mine of writing.

Respect is one of the greatest expressions of love. If other people try to write your story, it means they don't respect you. They consider that you're not a good artist who can write your own story, even though you were born to write your own story.

Nobody reads a mystery to get to the middle. They read it to get to the end. If it's a letdown, they won't buy anymore. The first page sells that book. The last page sells your next book.

Writing a song is like - you're writing a song all the time. It's just when it pops out. It's been there all the time. It's not something that suddenly you do it. It's always there. Suddenly, it's in the right mixture inside you to come out. Usually when you're writing on the piano or a guitar, you don't write in lyrics, on their own. To me it's very boring.

My first teacher was Steven Spielberg. I worked on Amazing Stories. That was my first job, as a writer and as a story editor. Watching him and his command of the tools of filmmaking, and his admiration for writing and the story itself, was the greatest lesson I ever had.

I like to write adventure stories; that's what I tell myself. But you can't help letting your own personality, your own experiences, slip through.

Here is how I work: when I think that a film needs to have a principal theme, I search for a melody. I have a very strange melodic gift: melodies come to me effortlessly. So I write melodies-thirty, forty, fifty-then I cast them off until I have just two or three. If only one is needed, I go see the director and ask him to decide. That happened one time with Jacques Demy for the duo of the twins [in Les demoiselles de Rochefort]: I went to his house in Noirmoutier to play 35 possible themes for him.

We have more poets than judges and interpreters of poetry. It is easier to write an indifferent poem than to understand a good one. There is, indeed, a certain low and moderate sort of poetry, that a man may well enough judge by certain rules of art; but the true, supreme, and divine poesy is equally above all rules and reason. And whoever discerns the beauty of it with the most assured and most steady sight sees no more than the quick reflection of a flash of lightning.

I try to write into the heart of experience. Then, through the experience of the writing, that heart reveals itself to me. To write it down for others, as a door to go through it they choose, is the price of the experience, the price of the ticket. This is the demand that God, if you like, puts on you for being an artist.