Writing Quotes - Page 601

It seems like songwriting for most songwriters is only one season in their life, a five or ten year period. For me, I don't worry about it, but I know there might come a day when I can't write anymore, or don't have good song ideas or the fire to do it anymore.

It has gone past me now, the writing phase.

I think the essence of the argument has always been, first of all, the Guild doesn't want writing on spec. And that's been a major problem over the years. But obviously, to the young writer that's unfair and it's discriminatory, and it can be very hurtful to one's career.

If you write beautifully, you write beautifully, that's all.

I've never had a "hankering" to direct. I can perform, but I can't write on that level. I tend to go off on tangents. Directing also requires a kind of specificity and I don't have it.

I was dressed up as a witch for Halloween, and wanted to write a story about my black cat before I went out trick-or-treating. I think it went out with the trash the next day.

Todd and Tim [Tobias] write the music, and I come up with the melodies and lyrics. I call it the Ohio Rock Factory. Tim and Todd run the northern plant in Cleveland, and I've got the southern plant down here in Dayton. No tours permitted.

I don't know what's wrong with me, My brain doesn't work anymore. I haven't any memory. I can't write. All I can do is sign my name. I tried to write the other day-it looked like I was writing in Braille.

The script changed so much over seven months and just had loads and loads of re-writes. I tried to tailor things to what I was interested in, like the relationship with the dad changed quite a lot because I thought one of the things when you're a young guy one of your biggest fears is this irrational fear of walking in your dad's footsteps and living the same life as him. I thought, even if your dad's a good guy, you just want to assert your independence on everything and it causes these irrational sort of rages.

I remember when I was younger I used to write in my diary: I want my luck to be spread. “Never give me anything too lucky all at once. I'll take a little luck now and then, but spread it for seventy years. “Now that all of this is happening, I'm sure the rest of my life will be ruined.

The secret of writing comedy is to know where it's all going, then get ahead of it.

Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.

The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.

The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction. They repeat, they re-arrange, they clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and they show us the web of experience, but with a singular change-that monstrous, consuming ego of ours being, nonce, struck out.

The difficulty is not to write, but to write what you mean.

With comedy, if you write something for me, I'm better at it. I'm not sure I'm so good at improvisational stuff.

All characters are based on elements of a writer's personal experience.

Keep a gratitude journal. Write down at least three things a day you are either thankful for, made you smile or genuinely inspired you.

When I began writing poems, it was in the late 60s and early 70s when the literary and cultural atmosphere was very much affected by what was going on in the world, which was, in succession, the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and the women's movement in the 60s, 70s, and into the early 80s. And all of those things affected me and affected my thinking, particularly the Vietnam War.

I am not fully forgiven until I allow God to write his new dream for my life on the blackboard of my mind. .. God has a great plan to redeem society. He needs me and wants to use me.

A lot of the things that involve power on the highest levels sometimes involve the darker side of human psychology. People can be very passive aggressive or they can be aggressive and they can conceal their intentions. There's this world that exists that nobody writes about or describes it's like a dirty little secret or taboo.

I was under twenty when I deliberately put it to myself one night after good conversation that there are moments when we actually touch in talk what the best writing can only come near. The curse of our book language is not so much that it keeps forever to the same set phrases . . . but that it sounds forever with the same reading tones. We must go out into the vernacular for tones that haven't been brought to book.

I write to find out what I didn't know I knew.

It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound-that he will never get over it.

Whether you're an unpublished novelist or a sixteen-time New York Times bestselling author, you can always improve your craft. You can always become a better writer.