Writing Quotes - Page 600

Black actors on the road, flying around the country working as poets. Those people are inspirations for millions of kids who write.

Let's say that history is what happened. The record of what happened is how each individual happens to see those events. They've already been filtered. When the historian or biographer takes over, history is no longer exactly what happened, because there has been a process of selection going on; it's impossible to write about anyone, any event, in any period of time, without in some way imposing, even unconsciously, your own standards, your own values.

From an over-arching point-of-view, in war there is heroism on both sides. Obviously, the victor gets the spoils, the victor gets to write history, but there's heroism and compassion on both sides, and to me that's very important.

A man writing a letter is a man in the act of thinking, and it was an exercise Reagan obviously enjoyed. After his first meeting with Gorbachev, for example, he sent a 'Dear Murph' letter about it to his old friend George Murphy, a former senator and actor who had once played Reagan's father in a film.

Pessimism is easy. We all can do it. We don't need to read books on how to be pessimists. We don't need guidance on how to think negatively. But we do need guidance on how to think positively. People that write books on how to do that are multimillionaires.

I used to always throw in random questions. I'd have to ask about artist's single and their writing process, which I know is every artist's most-hated question, like, "Well what was ,your process?" And it's. like, "Well, I wrote this album." And then at the end I would throw in, like, "So, Seinfeld or Simpsons?" and they'd be so thrown, because everything else could be autopilot. All my greatest moments were from the most sporadic questions.

Spike Lee made such a difference in terms of black filmmakers, the subtleties - those authors, those writers who write from love, and those who write from that lofty position of superiority.I felt he took aspects of the black experience in America and held it up for us to see. He tried to put it in perspective. He did put it in perspective in his unique way.

Riffing on language will create wonderful effects you never intended. Which leads me to this writing advice: 'Always take credit for good stuff you didn't intend, because you'll be getting plenty of criticism in your career for bad stuff you didn't mean either.'

The actual act of writing brings me such pleasure - to tell stories, to engage in cultural criticism, to reflect, to question, all of it is invigorating.

I think as more people get more aware, people get more defensive. And when I say that, I mean people who are more privileged, like men. People will think that by pointing out patriarchy and an oppression, that means that all men are horrible people, and they'll write that on social media, and I think that's something that's increased.

That the things that have impacted me most are not news articles written by older people that I would have no relation to; the things that impact me most are things written by people closer to my age. And I wanted to write things in a way where somebody my age could read it and feel like they are holding somebody's hand and be with somebody.

Good writing is good writing. In many ways, it’s the audience and their expectations that define a genre. A reader of literary fiction expects the writing to illuminate the human condition, some aspect of our world and our role in it. A reader of genre fiction likes that, too, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of the story.

And, you know, I liked writing humor. Well, I should say, I wanted to write seriously, but it kept turning funny.

I am the queen of hashtags! I love hashtags. I think in hashtags. I wish I could write everything in hashtag.

There's always that moment when you realize what it's going to be. You might have an overarching theme and you need to fill in the blanks - and then there's this "Aha" moment when you see where it's going. That's the most satisfying part of writing.

I left things out - my motivations, my history, my emotional responses - because I am not good at understanding them or writing about them. I tried and it was generally boring and always unconvincing. Most importantly I wanted to try to place Afghans and Afghanistan in the foreground rather than my own character.

I'm definitely excited by big ideas, both in what I write and what I read. Most days, reality is so mind-numbingly dull that I don't understand why someone would write strictly realistic stories, given the almost limitless freedom fiction provides. I don't see the point of making believe if you're not going to actually make believe: hang your ass out in the wind, push at every boundary, make almost unreasonable demands on your reader's willingness to suspend disbelief. This is dangerous, and prone to failure, but that's part of what makes it fun.

Writing a funny story is one thing. But writing a funny story that inspires others to venture beyond their level of comfort in pursuit of their greater good is what makes me come alive.

When a friend of mine introduced me to the music of Luca C & Brigante I was stuck with an apocalyptic feeling, as if I were listening to the sound of a party at the end of the world. And with such strong imagery coming to mind I was only too happy to write with them when they asked. Flash of Light is about that last night on earth, a forewarning of the end of an era and a last chance to Love.

My favorite form is the short story. From an aesthetics stand point you really have to pare down to the bone. You can't write a throw-away scene.

It's really an orchestral piece featuring a group and it was quite revolutionary at the time and it in fact, it kicked Deep Purple off as a name in Great Britain because it made all the newspapers. Everyone was writing about us. And there was some confusion as to what kind of band we were after that, which is why Deep Purple in Rock is such a hard unbending album of really furious hard heavy rock. Heavy metal hadn't been invented at that point.

It is not possible to redefine marriage. Marriage is the union between a man and a woman, has been historically, remains so. It is Alice in Wonderland territory, Orwellian almost, for any Government of any political persuasion to seek to come along and try to re-write the lexicon. It will not do.

I find that when I am actually writing, I enter a zone of concentration too small to admit my troubles.

The God we worship writes his name upon our faces.

Twenty to one offend more in writing too much than too little.