Writing Quotes - Page 547

I used to hide my real emotions in gobbledegook, like in In His Own Write. When I wrote teenage poems, I wrote in gobbledegook because I was always hiding my real emotions from Mimi.

Thank heaven, though, one of the few mistakes I haven't made is to talk about the unwritten book.

Write more. That's the advice I would give myself.

I've been writing a book called The Economics of Innocent Fraud. I published part of it already in The Progressive ("Free Market Fraud," January 1999). But I've been interrupted these last few months. It deals with all of the things we do, in an innocent way, to cover up the truth.

I think empathy is a guy who punches you in the face at a bus station, and you're somehow able to look at that him and know enough about what situation he was in to know that he had to do that and not to hit back. That's empathy, and nothing ever happens in writing that has that kind of moral heroism about it.

I think the sport of wrestling, which I became involved with at the age of 14... I competed until I was 34, kind of old for a contact sport. I coached the sport until I was 47. I think the discipline of wrestling has given me the discipline I have to write.

The unspoken factor is love. The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it's not work for me.

Writing is hard. I learned how to work hard from wrestling, not English courses.

Whatever I write, no matter how gray or dark the subject matter, it's still going to be a comic novel.

Advertising was fairly simple work, and I really just wanted a job where I could sit and write every day and not get fired for it like I had at other jobs, but it was fun.

I so desperately hate to end these movies that the first thing I do when I'm done is write another one. Then I don't feel sad about having to leave and everybody going away.

My biggest superhero of writing is Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine fabulist. He's an amazingly perceptive writer, but also willing to make a joke.

My attitude these days is, if you write a bad song, what are they gonna do, throw you in songwriter jail?

You cannot write to resonate twenty or thirty or forty years from now. You only can write for that very day, but whatever happens is all gravy.

You don't push the button that says "Now I will write something that resonates in time." You don't know. It's what happens after a play is finished.

I don't start a novel until I have lived with the story for awhile to the point of actually writing an outline and after a number of books I've learned that the more time I spend on the outline the easier the book is to write. And if I cheat on the outline I get in trouble with the book.

Writing a novel is like heading out over the open sea in a small boat. It helps, if you have a plan and a course laid out.

I think any music of any worth has been done by people who were very interested in the internal process of their soul and their mind that's taking place while they're writing music.

On the whole, dialogue is the most difficult thing, without any doubt. It's very difficult, unfortunately. You have to detach yourself from the notion of a lifelike quality. You see, actually lifelike, tape-recorded dialogue like this has very little to do with good novel dialogue. It's a matter of getting that awful tyranny of mimesis out of your mind, which is difficult.

Ask how to live? Write, write, write, anything; The world's a fine believing world, write news.

The end of satire is the amendment of vices by correction; and he who writes honestly is no more an enemy to the offender than the physician to the patient when he prescribes harsh remedies.

A writer judging his own work is like deceived husband - he is frequently the last person to appreciate the true state of affairs.

I can pinpoint the moment when my first band recorded, when I was 14 and 15 years old. I always enjoyed writing songs and playing, but there was something about going in and capturing it that felt very Zen and perfect for me. A light switch went on and I just realized that's where my musical capacity was the most suited. I just followed on blind faith that that was like a calling for me.

As Daniel Levitin writes, our brain is a "giant pattern detector." If we read something that coincides with what we already believe we're more likely to give it credence, while the opposite is not true.

Sometimes the easiest-seeming stories to a reader are the hardest kind to write.