Writing Quotes - Page 560

Writing books isn't a drastic departure from writing for the stage.

It was the typical paranoid experience [to hide coke]. As soon as I knew my hiding place, I thought the whole world knew it. I'd write clues to my hiding places in code, then forget the code and spend the rest of the day looking for my coke.

Paddy Chayefksy was writing and it was a time where everybody was happy to be there [on TV].

I would not want to write something about something I do not think about

Please Mia," he implores. "Don't make me write a song.

In my writing with Extreme, there are heavy themes. The cover photo has me with a gun to my neck. I am not advocating suicide. I am taking the philosophy that man is the measure of his own fate.

If you taught me to read and provided for me the same computer system as someone has provided for Stephen Hawking, I, too, would write great books. And yet you don't teach me to read, and you don't give me a computer stick I can push around with my nose to point at the next letter I wish typed. So whose fault is it that I am what I am?

My partner after Fred Freeman was Jerry Belson. And Jerry Belson, after I was doing so well writing situation comedy, said, this is not good enough. We got to create our own shows. I said, but we're very happy doing this. No, no, no, you got to get your own show. So he made me - and he and I created our own shows. And we actually - everything we created failed. "Hey, Landlord" was our first show - 99th in the ratings. But imagine this - it's a great reflection on the years.

I write for a radio show that, no matter what, will go on the air Saturday at five o'clock central time. You learn to write toward that deadline, to let the adrenaline pick you up on Friday morning and carry you through, to cook up a monologue about Lake Wobegon and get to the theater on time.

To write good SF today...you must push further and harder, reach deeper into your own mind until you break through into the strange and terrible country wherein live your own dreams.

But, because my private lectures and domestic pupils are a great hinderance and intteruption of my studies, I wish to live entirely exempt from the former, and in great measure from the latter. ... in short, I should wish to gain my bread from my writings.

I think the beauty of documentary work is that it's a mystery - you never know where it's going to lead you. You start out with some notion of it, but it's very different from a script. A script you write, you shoot against, and you know what the story is going to be. There's always the element of surprise, but the surprise comes from performance, from something that's improvised, it comes from someone who sees it inside an already determined framework. In documentary, it's never determined. It's never the same, and affords enormous possibility.

I've been writing songs since I was like six or seven. I've been writing poetry and short stories and stuff, but my first serious, serious song, I wrote when I was fourteen.

As publishing has become less expensive, the urge to write my own self has become the opportunity to publish my own self. Everyone now can afford to preach in the desert.

A book should long for pen, ink, and writing-table: but usually it is pen, ink, and writing-table that long for a book. That is why books are so negligible nowadays.

Every one being allowed to learn to read, ruineth in the long run not only writing but also thinking.

I was thinking of writing a little foreword saying that history is, after all, based on people's recollections, which change with time.

It is a good thing to read books, and need not be a bad thing to write them, but in any case, it is a pious thing to collect them.

It won't be long before we'll be writing together again. I just hope they have a decent piano up there.

I want to clear my mind a little bit and give my mind a little bit of time to breathe so I can pinpoint or at least nail down feelings I'm having and that I've had for the last however long. I need to nail them down long enough to actually write about and elaborate on them.

I wanted to escape the unrest, to shut out the voices around me and within me, so I write.

I feel like I can be infinitely inspired because New York is huge. There's always a new street I can go to, or a billion new people who I haven't met that I could write about. New York is very humbling.

I'm trying to do what Frank O'Hara did and remind myself there there's a lot of good stuff. I write about New York for my own mental health.

Kid's heads are filled with so many nonfacts that when they get out of school they're totally unprepared to do anything. They can't read, they can't write, they can't think. Talk about child abuse. The U.S. school system as a whole qualifies.

I write what I like to write. Those who like to listen to it, listen to it. And the ones who don't, watch football and drink beer, jog, go to discos and so forth. I never claimed to be a man for all seasons.