Writing Quotes - Page 548

I'm not good at comparing and contrasting. I take what's in front of me for what it is, although I guess there's something about Paul's realistic writing that is like Cassavetes.

I started writing just to have a creative outlet during the down time.

I kept saying to myself, this is a calling that God has given me. And so with intention I said, "Okay I'm going to write books not only for the Christian community, but also for the secular community." I found it really rewarding because the last one to use my gifts and advantages to people who look at church as not on their radar screen at all, it gives me favor with - I do a lot with Fortune 500 companies now.

I thought if I was open and honest, it would help the reader to get open and honest, and they also would realize sometimes when you write a book, people think you're an expert and that's not always true.

To be shockingly original with your first novel, you don’t have to discover a new technique: Simply write about people as they are and not as the predominantly liberal and humanist literary establishment believes that they ought to be.

Avoid all controversy in preaching, talking, or writing; preach nothing down but the devil, and nothing up but Jesus Christ.

I wanted to write about looking at the world, so it's more about helping people, or persuading people, to see what is around us; both the marvellous and the terrible.

Fitzgerald never got rid of anything; the ghosts of his adolescence, the failures of his youth, the doubts of his maturity plagued him to the end. He was supremely a part of the world he described, so much a part that he made himself its king and then, when he saw it begin to crumble, he crumbled with it and led it to death.

The universal object and idol of men of letters is reputation.

You are a Virginian, and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business. I am obnoxious, suspected and unpopular; you are very much otherwise. And you can write ten times better than I can.

My counsel is, to force nothing, and rather to trifle and sleep away all unproductive days and hours, than on such days to compose something that will afterwards give no pleasure.

We are pantheists when we study nature, polytheists when we write poetry, monotheists in our morality.

Characters last. Beautiful writing lasts. A compelling narrative lasts. Art survives long after ideas go extinct.

I am sober, grounded, focused, I'm writing again, I like where I am. I'm real positive and I got this great family that came along with my wife - I'm happily married and she's a great part of me that was missing - and I feel real good.

You put the republican members of congress who are up for re-election, and quite candidly, the democrats, because every democratic congressperson ought to be writing, tweeting, and you put them on notice. We are the boss of this government, not the [Donald] Trump.

I'd love to act more. I've had to turn down multiple movies because I was on tour, but it's encouraging to know that someday there might be the right role, the right timing. And I've been writing a lot of music, so hopefully very soon I'll have recorded a project of my own. I also want to get a boat and open a restaurant.

I wanted to write a song that's known to the world as a classic, stadium-rock anthem.

As a writer, you have to first of all write what you want to. Listen to advice, by all means, but don't get bogged down in it.

It's a fallacy that writers have to shut themselves up in their ivory towers to write. I have all these interruptions, three of which I gave birth to. If I was thrown for a loop every time I was distracted I could never get anything done.

Read a ton. Take a workshop course so you learn to give and get criticism.

"Stupid English." "English isn't stupid," I say. "Well, my English teacher is." He makes a face. "Mr. Franklin assigned an essay about our favorite subject, and I wanted to write about lunch, but he won't let me." "Why not?" "He says lunch isn't a subject." I glance at him. "It isn't." "Well," Jacob says, "it's not a predicate, either. Shouldn't he know that?"

I always love writing about children.

The thing that's interesting about storytelling is people will say, "How do I write a movie I can get sold in this category?" For God's sake, the first movie that you can get made will be your personal story, because nobody's heard it before.

When you're writing, you're demented, alone, and full of doubt. It feels dangerous.

As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs...The way I write is who I am, or have become.