Writing Quotes - Page 554

I think that perhaps if I had had to slow down the ideas so that I could capture them on paper I might have stifled some of them.

Do you know what I was smiling at? You wrote down that you were a writer by profession. It sounded to me like the loveliest euphemism I had ever heard. When was writing ever your profession? It's never been anything but your religion.

I love to write and I assure you I write regularly... But I write for myself, for my own pleasure. And I want to be left alone to do it.

The more I read, the less I admire modern theology. the more I study the productions of the new schools of theological teachers, the more I marvel that men and women can be satisfied with such writings. There is a vagueness, a mistiness, a shallowness, an indistinctness, a superficiality, an aimlessness, a hollowness about the literature of the 'broader and kinder systems', as they are called, which to my mind stamps their origin on their face. They are of the earth, earthy.

Anything that you want to write about you can write about in sports.

There never was an age in which so many people were able to write badly.

Short stories do not say this happened and this happened and this happened. They are a microcosm and a magnification rather than a linear progression.

I have T.V. on all the time when I'm writing. I have music on. I'm engaged with the world.

Writing has made me a better man. It has put me in contact with those fleeting moments which prove the existence.

All sorrows can be borne if you can put them into a story.

I start with a tingle, a kind of feeling of the story I will write. Then come the characters, and they take over, they make the story.

Writing is my only interest. Even speaking is an interruption.

Even if I could not earn a penny from my writing, I would earn my livelihood at something else and continue to write at night.

We [he and Halmos] share a philosophy about linear algebra: we think basis-free, we write basis-free , but when the chips are down we close the office door and compute with matrices like fury.

Could we say that the short short is to other kinds of fiction somewhat as the lyric is to other kinds of poetry? The lyric does not seek meaning through extension, it accepts the enigmas of confinement. It strives for a rapid unity of impression, an experience rendered in its wink of immediacy. And so too with the short short.

I do not think that one is likely to write a good biography unless one feels some sympathy with its subject.

[On writing biography:] ... every human life is at once so complex and so simple, so perplexing and so clear, so superficial and so profound, that any attempt to present it as a unified, consistent whole, to enclose it within a rigid frame, inevitably tempts one to cheat or to falsify.

I write because, exacting as it may be to do so, it is still more difficult to refrain, and because - however conscious of one's limitations one may be - there is always at the back of one's mind an irrational hope that this next book will be different: it will be the rounded achievement, the complete fulfilment. It never has been: yet I am still writing.

I write 'by the seat of my pants.' I love to do research. I am inspired by contemporary writers and contemporary events. I live in the real world.

The greatest compliment a writer can be given is that a story and character hold a reader spellbound. Im caught up in the story writing and I miss a good deal of sleep thinking about it and working out the plot points.

I play piano and write better than I can sing.

Either I did away with that fear through writing, or in the course of writing, I discovered it was no longer so intrusive or threating. The bottom line is, it's gone.

I was invited by a publisher to write the text for Tantra.[1] Having done some research, what fascinated me was the evidence that many 'tantric' ideas actually came to India from the Mediterranean. It is rather a dry read and debunks reports of orgies and sexual mischief – sorry to disappoint.

When I first started writing cookbooks, I remember thinking to myself, what makes me think I can write a cookbook? There are these great chefs who are really trained. And, as I started, I realized, actually, what is my lack is actually exactly right, because I can connect with - cooking's hard for me. I never worked on... And that's why my recipes are really simple, because I want to be able to do them.

I think that I had a very clear vision when I started writing cookbooks what I wanted it to be, and that you would open the book, that you would look at the photograph and go, that looks delicious. And then you would look at the recipe and say, I can actually make that and I can make it with ingredients I can find in the grocery store.