Writing Quotes - Page 544

For me, no matter how serious the subject is, when I try to write about it, I have to write about it from a comic point of view. It's just the way it comes out.

Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.

I want women writers to write boldly, wildly, deeply. I want them to feel really liberated to tell the brutal truth, however they see that truth and are moved to tell it.

Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang. When a line is good it ceases to belong to any school. A line of prose must be as immutable as a line of poetry.

The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.

I'm afraid that surprise, shock, and regret is the fate of authors when they finally see themselves on the page.

Taking the time to write in our lives gives us the time of our lives. As we describe our environments, we begin to savor them. Even the most rushed and pell-mell life begins to take on the patina of being cherished.

We have this idea that we need to be in the mood to write. We don't.

We should write, above all, because we are writers, whether we call ourselves that or not.

I think he [Vaclav Havel] probably would have liked to have written more plays. I think he missed being a playwright.I think he talked about wanting to write plays and keep appealing to people through that medium, rather than politics.

The poetry and the songs that you are suppose to write, I believe are in your heart. You just have to open up your heart and not be afraid to get them out.

When you ask, did writing change my life? It totally changed my life. It gave me my life.

The child from 9 to 12 interests me very much. And so, those were the years that I like to write about, when I'm writing.

When I started to write, it was the '70s, and throughout that decade, we didn't have any problems with book challenges or censorship.

I think people who write for kids, we have that ability to go back into our own lives.

I wanted to write honest books for kids because I didn't have those when I was a kid.

What I remember when I started to write was how I couldn't wait to get up in the morning to get to my characters.

Have some sort of a private place to work in. Put up a sign to keep from being interrupted. Mine says: "Please, do not knock, do not say hello or goodbye, do not ask what's for dinner, do not disturb me unless the police or firemen have to be called."

Writing is the perfect balance between self-confidence and self-doubt, with a bit of self-delusion thrown in.

I think, there were probably problems with show business where producers and directors would try to get the writing credit also. So they created a rule where the bar, to get your name added to the writing credits, if you've done a revision, is very high if you're also the producer or director.

Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard. The one is presumably articulate and social, a shared language, the voice of "communication"; the other is private, allusive, teasing, sly, idiosyncratic as the spider's delicate web, a kind of witchcraft unfathomable to ordinary minds.

How fascinating to a child are words: the shapes, sounds, textures and mysterious meanings of words; the way words link together into elastic patterns called "sentences." And these sentences into paragraphs, and beyond.

Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books. It may be the case that we all must write many books in order to achieve a few lasting ones - just as a young writer or poet might have to write hundreds of poems before writing his first significant one.

My writing is full of lives I might have led.

Everything has been for the [President] election for the last couple of months. Since the Democratic National Convention, it's been a dead run to get out as much content as possible and do as much as possible. Then, I go back to writing the screenplay I was working on, which is an original piece - a period piece that I will hopefully finish a couple of months after that, and hopefully I can convince some unsuspecting fool studio to buy.