Writing Quotes - Page 540

Cowriting is very personal. A great song is an honest song, so you have to be able to open up to the person in the room. It's like a blind date. I know in the first five minutes if it's gonna be weird.

When I am asked how I began writing poems, I talk about the indifference of nature.

There are many aspects of time we just do not understand. That’s the thing about writing a popular book: You realize the things you understand because for those you can give a really simple explanation. But some things about time I just don’t know how to give simple explanations for, even though I can tell you mathematically what’s going on.

All I've really ever done is write since I was 17, so I don't know anything about anything. For me to do a novel, I have to talk to people who know things. And what keeps me in suspense is that I am a crime aficionado.

I actually don't believe that everybody should necessarily try to learn to code. I think it's reasonably specialized, and nobody really expects most people to have to do it. It's not like knowing how to read and write and do basic math.

Fairy tales and folk tales have always played a role in my writing in one way or another.

The funny thing about writing is I think a lot of people assume that you're sitting in a garret with a quill pen for hour after hour.

I used to go into rooms of older executives and try to pitch talk show ideas and when I was writing as a journalist I would pitch ideas for my articles and I definitely understand that excitement of a pitch and what that is to be young and a woman and trying to make your voice heard.

When I hit a period of not being able to write music, I get up and walk away. It's pretty mean but it's true.

On a spectrum of literary productions, memoir is just another form. If the person doing the reviewing or critiquing was ill-educated about literary forms, they could write something dunderheaded about the author or their life (I've seen these and barfed at them), but anyone who is well-practiced and educated in literature - why would they leave that at the door when entering memoir?

I work from the body - I try to develop a language of the body. I've invented a term I call "corporeal writing" around that idea. I love teaching and collaborating around this idea, because no new breakthrough in literature ever happened because everyone was doing what was already there.

I find it hard to express myself when writing from the f - - - heart or the a - , or wherever. It's just like anything, it's (easier) when you get used to it, but I've not done it. I was just a singer in a band.

The commas are the most useful and usable of all the stops. It is highly important to put them in place as you go along. If you try to come back after doing a paragraph and stick them in the various spots that tempt you you will discover that they tend to swarm like minnows into sorts of crevices whose existence you hadn't realized and before you know it the whole long sentence becomes immobilized and lashed up squirming in commas. Better to use them sparingly, and with affection, precisely when the need for each one arises, nicely, by itself.

Epithets, like pepper, Give zest to what you write; And if you strew them sparely, They whet the appetite: But if you lay them on too thick, You spoil the matter quite!

It's amazing what I could've written in my life if I had realized that I should keep writing and not masturbating.

Writing is thinking and thinking is hard work.

Don't take anyone's writing advice too seriously.

DeLillo never seems committed to me to what he is writing. Very nice surfaces, but he's got nothing underneath.

We can contemplate the creation of new kinds of vital texts: curate sociology rather than just write it

I think that any songwriter - and I think that Bob Dylan knows this more than all of us - you don't write the songs anyhow.

The fact that my songs take a long time to write is no guarantee of their excellence.

Research to me is as important or more important than the writing. It is the foundation upon which the book is built

I don't think I'd be able to flat-out write a pop song and make it satisfying to me. I'm ready to make a consistent sound in whatever way I can.

I'm not writing just classic-sounding songs, but songs that come from experience.

I don't think about the styles. I write whatever comes out and I use whatever kind of instrumentation works for those songs.