Writing Quotes - Page 559

Actually, it is a fact that I've been doing more writing than playing in recent years.

I think if you're writing from the heart, very often, the subject matter will adjust as you age... but you try to write the best song you can possibly write. For us, we have the same basic elements that make up the America sound.

Cecil Castellucci is writing Shade, who is the perfect writer for it. I love her young adult stuff, and it's pretty hardcore and visceral, so I knew she was going to bring that to the book.

I still write music, and I still have sessions, and I still record, but I have no plans.

I do not write for the public. You are my public and I hope to convert you.

I'm a visual thinker. With almost all of my writing, I start with something that's visual: either the way someone says something that is visual or an actual visual description of a scene and color.

If I went back to college again, I'd concentrate on learning to write and to speak before an audience . Nothing is more important than the abillity to communicate effectively.

When I write a page that reads badly I know that it is myself who has written it. When it reads well it has come through from somewhere else.

Long ago, during my apprenticeship in the wine trade, I learned that wine is more than the sum of its parts, and more than an expression of its physical origin. The real significance of wine as the nexus of just about everything became clearer to me when I started writing about it. The more I read, the more I traveled, and the more questions I asked, the further I was pulled into the realms of history and economics, politics, literature, food, community, and all else that affects the way we live. Wine, I found, draws on everything and leads everywhere.

I sent American troops to Iraq to make its people free, not to make them American. Iraqis will write their own history and find their own way.

Don't try to outguess what's going on in publishing, and write what you want to write.

That's what a story must feel like to me. It's not, "I want to write about a gravedigger." But you're walking along and - boop! shovel. "Ok, what does one do with a shovel? Digs a hole. Why? I don't know yet. Dig the hole! Oh, look a body."

Writing a story I am just trying to find some little interesting thing to start out with: something small, even trivial. Preferably something that doesn't have a lot of thematic or political baggage - a little crumb that is interesting.

If I'm writing a story and you're reading it, or vice versa, you took time out of your day to pick up my book. I think the one thing that will kill that relationship is if you feel me condescending to you in the process.

With non-fiction writing I feel like I'm confined and driven by what actually happened. That makes the "plot". So it's a process of getting all of my notes typed up, then scanning through the notes, trying to extract or find certain vignettes that seem like they might write well - that might have a potential for good energy, shape, etc. And then at some point I start stringing these together, keeping an eye on the word count.

Honestly, the choice is: I can be a cheerful person, more awake to correction, more of a force for good ... when I'm writing. Or I can be the opposite of all those things, when I'm not writing.

You don't have to write to me if you don't feel like it. There's no real friendship without absolute freedom.

The most honest of men is the one who thinks and acts best, but the most powerful is the one who writes and speaks best.

I want you to be afraid to turn the page (and to do that) you need to show right from the beginning that you're playing for keeps.

I'm a better writer now because I've worked very hard at getting better. My long-range goal will always be to write better books.

The four great motives for writing prose are sheer egoism, esthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose.

To write a verse or two is all the praise That I can raise.

The art of writing is not, as many seem to imagine, the art of bringing fine phrases into rhythmical order, but the art of placing before the reader intelligible symbols of the thoughts and feelings in the writer's mind.

What the hell do you want to work for somebody else for? Work for yourself!

There's never been a great fight without the writers taking on and finding an identity for it. That's probably what has happened boxing. Writers are not writing about us big boys anymore and I tell you right, however you feel, take something, find it, and use it because American needs something to read about.