Writing Quotes - Page 602

Hopefully, I write what I don't know.

Before I was a parent I was struck by Rilke, who, as you know, didn't go to his daughter's wedding because he was writing a poem that day. That was the ideal for artistic behavior in 1950. That's the way I wanted to live.

I couldn't sit down and write a novel or a short story - even now - because of my dyslexia. But I learned narration through movies.

David Mamet, Tim Kazurinsky, and Denise DeClue, who adapted [ About Last Night]. Between the three of them... I mean, it's always down to the writing. You're only as good as your writing.

When you're writing, it's rather like going on a very long walk

When writing about oneself, one must strive to be truthful. Truth is more important than modesty.

When you're writing a book, it's rather like going on a very long walk, across valleys and mountains and things [...] The highest mountain on the walk is obviously the end of the book, because it's got to be the best view of all, when everything comes together and you can look back and see that everything you've done all ties up. But it's a very, very long, slow process.

I love to write jokes and that's all I think about.

I get so happy when I write a joke. It's a very satisfying, liberating feeling.

Tragedy massages the human ego even as comedy deflates it. ... Tragedy pits us against large foes and the trip wire is our own character. ... In comedy we fall afoul of one another. Comedy depends on social life, on our behavior in groups. In tragedy you can observe one human against the gods. In comedy it's one human versus other humans and often one man (or woman if I'm writing it) against her own worst impulses.

Money and writing appear to be mutually exclusive.

The last thing I have to say is that ice is the past tense of water. I've always wanted to write that sentence and now I have.

Hollywood called just as I crested thirty. My novels did not and still do not interest them, but my writing ability did.

I've got splinters in my nose from the best publishing doors in town.

I've always felt that the poems I've written which have historical context are hopefully not just simply plucking something out of history and saying great, let's write about that. In every case what has happened is that I've become fascinated or haunted by something and couldn't shake it.

I'm never quite sure how the poem is going to resolve itself and that I'm always in some way surprised. I make a discovery in a poem as I write it.

Ringo: 'I do get emotional when I think back about those times. My make-up is emotional. I'm an emotional human being. I'm very sensitive and it took me till I was forty-eight to realize that was the problem! We were honest with each other and we were honest about the music. The music was positive. It was positive in love. They did write - we all wrote - about other things, but the basic Beatles message was Love.

A book is a private thing, citizen; it belongs to the one who writes it and to the one who reads it. Like the mind itself, a book is a private space. Within that space, anything is possible. The greatest evil and the greatest good.

I like to write when I feel I'm the real me.

There’s a big difference between death threats and love letters–even if the person writing the death threats still claims to actually love you. Of course, considering I once tried to kill someone I loved, maybe I had no right to judge.

If in my lifetime the problem of non-free software is solved, I could perhaps relax and write software again. But I might instead try to help deal with the world's larger problems. Standing up to an evil system is exhilarating, and now I have a taste for it.

I had been used to improvising and even in the audition I was feeling free to rearrange Aaron Sorkin words a little bit, as lovely as they were. I didn't find out until after I got the part how furious Aaron was at me for doing that. They said, "He was livid. He did everything in his power not to jump down your throat!" But I came to realise that Aaron was writing in metre and the rhythm of the language is very important.

I've never written nearly as much about place as people seem to think I do. I just write about class.

When authors who write literary fiction begin to write screenplays, everybody assumes that's the end. Here's another who's never going to write well again.

I think it would be harder for me not to write comedy because the comic view of things is the one that comes most naturally to me.