Writing Quotes - Page 574

Mexico is a very complex, mysterious country. I will never understand it fully, and that's why I write so much about it, in order to try to understand it.

Most writers in Mexico have had posts as ambassadors, secretaries - that is no longer the case. Now a writer can live off writing. He has an audience: there are publishing houses, there are newspapers - so the situation is not as terrible as it used to be when there were no means and he had to go into government service, be an ambassador or a cabinet minister, etc. So, things are changing in the sense that the civil society is now the protagonist. The writer therefore occupies a different position, but no less influential than in the past, in a new, democratic society.

Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of magic.

Don't worry about what anyone else thinks - write what you must.

All my writings may be considered tasks imposed from within, their source was a fateful compulsion. What I wrote were things that assailed me from within myself. I permitted the spirit that moved me to speak out.

People often say that writing is ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration. This is nonsense, of course. It's pretty much one hundred percent caffeine.

If it's inappropriate to write about, if there's nothing funny about it, then it's not funny.

What interests me is what you might call vernacular writing, writing that connects you to a place.

What began the change was the very writing itself. Let no one lightly set about such a work. Memory, once waked, will play the tyrant.

Even when I feared and detested Christianity, I was struck by its essential unity, which, in spite of its divisions, it has never lost. I trembled on recognizing the same unmistakable aroma coming from the writings of Dante and Bunyan, Thomas Aquinas and William Law.

I really think more fledgling novelists - and many current and even established novelists - should get out into the real world and cover local politics, sports, culture, and crime and write it up on deadline.

...By a 'silly' theory I mean one which may be held at the time when one is talking or writing professionally, but which only an inmate of a lunatic asylum would think of carrying into daily life. ... It must not be supposed that the men who maintain these theories and beliefs are 'silly' people. Only very acute and learned men could have thought of anything so odd or defended anything so preposterous against the continual protests of common sense.

I like to write with a lot of emotion and a lot of power. Sometimes I overdo it; sometimes my prose is a little bit too purple, and I know that.

What are you going to do with astronauts who first reach the surface of Mars and then turn around and rocket back home-ward? What are they going to do, write their memoirs? Would they go again? Having them repeat the voyage, in my view, is dim-witted. Why don't they stay there on Mars?

I really enjoy writing lyrics, I enjoy harmonies and I enjoy hearing the organic side of production because I have to do so much non- organic for a living for other artists, it's just a break for me, for my ears and it confuses people that think my music is supposed to sound like the stuff I do for my day job, but that's just people that don't know me.

I'd advise all you songwriters out there, if you're getting into it for the business, go home and get a job digging ditches or something. Get a life. You'll learn a lot more, and you won't write a lot of rotten poetry.

When I go into a pitch room and I'm pitching something with a writing partner, everybody tends to look at the guy, even if I'm doing a lot of the talking.

The simple act of writing down a goal and making a written plan for its accomplishment moves you to the top 3 percent.

...the vital point to remember is that the swine who just sent your pearl of a story back with nothing but a coffee-stain and a printed rejection slip can be wrong. You cannot take it for granted that he is wrong, but you have an all-important margin of hope that might be enough to keep you going.

Since the big band started I'm just always swamped with movies and things. It certainly pays the bills and it's very satisfying, because I get to write all these big charts and all this crazy music.

When historians get to write the truth about this completely unnecessary referendum [Brexit] they won't say it was a vote demanded by the British people to decide their national destiny. They will say it was the final battle in a decades-long Tory Civil War, at the heart of which was a fight to the death between two Old Etonians, David Cameron and Boris Johnson, for the hollow crown. A sort of Eton Wall Game. Where the poorest are put up against the wall and shot.

'Write what you know' works, but it's limiting. Write what fascinates you. Write what you can't stop thinking about.

I start with something that makes me angry or confused, and then I write about it. It's a form of self-help.

My lyrics are generated by various peculiar processes. Very random and similar to automatic writing.

You know that in order to copyright material somebody has to write it down for you. Any piece of recorded material has to be scored in order for it to be copyrighted. I've seen the scores of my things and they don't resemble the music in any way. If you give them to somebody who has never heard the music and say, "What does this sound like to you?" they'll play you something that has no relationship with the music it derives from. Notation simply isn't adequate.