Writing Quotes - Page 581

Enduring fame is promised only to those writers who can offer to successive generations a substance constantly renewed; for every generation arrives upon the scene with its own particular hunger.

I was really surprised at the success of 'House of Sand and Fog,' because it is so awfully dark. Believe it or not, when writing it, I never had the word 'tragedy' in my head - I wasn't trying to write a dark book at all.

People ... have no idea what a hard job it is for two writers to be friends. Sooner or later you have to talk about each other's work.

Writing more and more to the sound of music, writing more and more like music. Sitting in my studio tonight, playing record after record, writing, music a stimulant of the highest order, far more potent than wine.

That is my essential reason for writing, not for fame, not to be celebrated after death, but to heighten and create life all around me. I also write because when I am writing I reach the high moment of fusion sought by the mystics, the poets, the lovers, a sense of communion with the universe.

Writing is a sad process, sitting on your ass for many, many hours, alone in a room, smelling like coffee, sadness and bitterness, and watching your youth leave.

If you do a scene and you really like a character in it or a premise in it to write it down and to work on it so that you can have five or six characters that you can pull out in an audition.

Sophisticated readers understand that writers work out their anger, their conflicts, their endless grief and rolling list of loss, through their stories. That however mean-spirited or diabolical, it's only a story. That the darkness in the soul is shaped into type and lies there, brooding and inert, black on the page, and active, dangerous, only in the reader's mind. Actually, harmless. I am not harmless.

I need to be very hungry all the time. I need to be very hungry to write.

It's while writing that suddenly a point of view appears: 'So, that's what I really thought about this thing'. Then it feels part of me.

Writing is an outlet, but it’s not an outlet of escape. People keep a journal when they want to escape. I write to rub my face in it.

I think the Internet really sussed things into perspective. Because twelve years ago, I could spend my days on writing and running my band and touring and making posters and practicing with my band and working on my vocals, but I didn't spend a large pie chart of my time sifting through criticism as well, and nowadays I do, and all female artists do, because to be able to promote your work, you need to live in those spaces.

My works are all expressly my own - pleasingly peculiar, not a borrowed stroke in one of them. I write as I feel and as I don't feel.

The literary man has a circle of the chosen few who read him and become his only public. . . . What more natural than that he should write for those who, even if they do not pay him, at least understand him?

In the year 2000 an illiterate person will not be someone who can't read or write, but someone who is not able to learn, unlearn and learn again.

I think Walt Whitman went to the help wanted section and found a squib that said "Wanted: National Poet." And he was innocent enough to believe there really was such a job. And if he could just write a poem that incorporated everything he felt and suspected and hoped for from America that he would have the position.

I'm interested in thinking about how are we contributing to the culture, what we can write that might help us deepen the culture, make us more reflective, make us more empathetic, make us feel our connectedness in other ways.

For some reason writing and drawing are very separate processes for me.

Writing in my journal keeps me focused on my spirit and what I need or feel.

What do prisoners do? Write, of course; even if they have to use blood as ink, as the Marquis de Sade did. The reasons they write, the exquisitely frustrating restrictions of their autonomy and the fact that no one listens to their cries, are all the reasons that mentally ill people, and even many normal people write. We write to escape our prisons.

Writing poems is my way of celebrating with the world that I have not committed suicide the evening before.

No song or poem will bear my mother's name. Yet so many of the stories that I write, that we all write, are my mother's stories.

For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone kind of life, just really being present to a lot of life. The writing has been really a byproduct of that.

For years and years I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel.

Writing and drawing are very therapeutic, but they are also an excellent manifestation tool. I teach my clients to draw what they want, or to write a story about it to bring the manifestation forward into the present.