Writing Quotes - Page 596

The best work that I am able to do is when I am willing to write about questions I haven't quite figured out, or things I'm really wrestling with, things that keep me up at night.

Writing plays for me is often an act of looking at basement-level fears in terms of where they come from.

Writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig

Before I published my first book, I worked for a while as a documentary and wedding/bar mitzvah videographer, and a part of me still mourns the lost filmmaker I'll never be. Working on a documentary is nearly the opposite artistic process to writing: as a writer you are always trying to fill out a world to fit your story, but as a documentarian your work is to carve a story out of the world. Sometimes, when I'm feeling particularly blocked at my computer, I miss the days when I could just point my camera at something interesting and wait to see what happens.

The ear writes my poems, not the mind.

The first task of the poet is to create the person who will write the poems.

I try to keep my voice in writing, and I think that's why I get so many complaints about how I write.

Jack [Kirby] and Joe [Simon] wrote and drew the stories themselves in the beginning and I was just, like, the office boy. But after a while they had more writing than they could handle and I was the only guy around, so they said, "Hey Stan, you think you can write this?" When you're seventeen years old, what do you know? I said, "Sure, I can do it!" And that was it.

From 1940 to about 1960, I had been writing just regular comics, the way my publishers wanted me too. He didn't want me to use words of more than two syllables if I could help it. He didn't want me to waste time on worrying about good dialogue or characterization. Just give me a lot of action, lot of fight scenes.

And if something should be found, particularly in the first part of the dissertation, that one is generally not accustomed to come across in scholarly writings, the reader must forgive my jocundity, just as I, in order to lighten the burden, sometimes sing at my work.

Sometimes writer's block is no more than a signal that you have not done enough research.

We write to understand our deepest secrets to ourselves, to understand. We write in an outpouring of love. We write in secret, either for publication or for a journal no one will see, or we write poems to be privately printed for the eyes of friends alone - this is not our choice. The urge is to create. The outcome belongs to God.

I write a woman's oaths in water.

Acting is contained - you act for three months, then leave it - but writing is the act of creation. Writing is dangerous.

I never write about CIA conspiracies or the FBI or mafia or anything like that because I just dont understand that world. But I think I do understand individual human harmfulness.

Why do people think that it's appropriate to talk to me about my body? Why do men think it's appropriate to literally write comments that not only I will see but that the world will see about my breast size, the clothes I should be taking off, the kinds of things they want to see more of on Instagram, which all refer to my body. And that's not even getting into the threats of violence. And they come every day. They come every day. And it's wild to me that people think this stuff is appropriate.

If you get trapped in your head and out of your body during the writing process, it's very easy to make wrong turns. You have to really be in touch with your heart rather than your head to write the novel you want.

I never think of my work as writing for a young audience, frankly, because I think it risks talking 'down' to them. The idea is for these books to work just as well as for adults as kids. As for what readers will take away, I just want them to love being in the world and see it as a safe place to explore things that adults are often uncomfortable talking to them about.

A reader's emotions can be sparked with few words. That's the power of dialogue.

Art is the manipulation of someone else's imagination.

Thich Nhat Hanh writes with the voice of the Buddha.

I come from a place of darkness when I write because I'm always trying to figure things out. It's kind of like my own therapy when I write music. It's me working through my own problems hopefully. And putting it into a song.

I think it's wrong to write in a totally esoteric language when you want to talk about things which interest a multitude of women.

There are moments when you have to write certain things and you don't have to think of your sex. If you are writing about the population of the thirteenth district in Paris, even if you are writing on the women in the thirteenth district, there's no need to consider your sex.

I think writing is such a great talent, and if I was better I would love to be a writer.