Writing Quotes - Page 610

I wasn't put on this earth to amass money or personal wealth. I was put on this earth to play guitar and write songs.

When you finish for the day, write a note reminding yourself of what you plan to do next. This helps you to remember today's great idea when you get back to work tomorrow.

I'm not a very good communicator, so maybe that's why I write about talking.

I wanted to write; I sought all possible paths of personal liberation, but I could never sacrifice a living instant of life for the sake of a line to be written, my balance for the sake of a manuscript, a storm within me for the sake of a poem. I loved life itself too much for this.

I'd probably be a super wealthy guy if I had sat around writing songs and getting them placed like everyone else I know. But I write songs about people or after I meet them and they're somewhat biographical - they're fiction but also non-fiction.

I'm very parasitic, from my own experiences. I just go and mine my dirty laundry, you know, and go through it until I find something that's interesting enough to me to write a song about.

We all have our muses. My grandmother and my mother are the people I write for. I'll never have to worry about who buys my work, or who likes it, and who doesn't. The people who I want to be proud of me already are.

Photographers direct the eye toward a particular object. We who write, one hopes, are directing the heart and the soul.

What's the trick to writing a great female character? Make her human.

Some sounds are coming from the keyboard and they are very important in the writing process, but on the other hand, we have melody and we have the song before, so if the keyboard sound fits very well, it takes its artistic direction. We play the machines and the machines play us.

An author is often obscure to the reader because they proceed from the thought to expression than like the reader from the expression to the thought.

To begin... To begin... How to start? I'm hungry. I should get coffee. Coffee would help me think. Maybe I should write something first, then reward myself with coffee. Coffee and a muffin. Okay, so I need to establish the themes. Maybe a banana-nut. That's a good muffin.

I find writing really hard, but then, every author I know finds writing really hard work.

You're never gonna outwrite the movement of the white clouds and the blue sky. You're never going to. There are times when I try to write beautifully, but I don't know if I'm trying to exorcise my own demons. If I am, there are other ones lurking beneath, because they keep coming out. Maybe little by little I'm fumigating.

Most of the poems I write go through forty versions and then stay in a file on my computer. I'm not very good at sending stuff out or feeling that something is ready to send out and I never have been. Part of the problem is that as soon as a poem is finished, it stops being all that interesting to me.

Nabokov quote: "I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child."

Poetry is a way of being alone without feeling alone. It allows you to experience another mind, I suppose. And it does that more fully than other art forms, I think. It doesn't simply describe an experience, or a feeling, or a moment: it evokes it through, say, rhythm or tone or diction or metaphor. It creates a mood. A poem communicates before it is understood; it's not a fully paraphrasable form, which distinguishes it from other forms of writing.

[Songwriting is] something that I own - it's my property, it's my music, it's my voice.

I'm really open to just about anything but I think the real dream is to be able to write my own thing.

I have things that I'm interested in, and I'm not really interested in writing about anything that I'm not interested in. But it's important to me to be able to see it from a different perspective, and add something new to the whole picture.

When I start to write a song, I initially fall into patterns and creative habits that are familiar, and because they're familiar, they sound convincing. It's important for me to not pursue those ideas, because I've already done them, but to find ideas that are different and feel strange to write and disconcerting to write.

At DePauw, I was teaching writing and fiction. The things I wanted to teach, more than anything else, were form and theory of the novel, of narrative. I liked those classes.

Stephen King once told me he liked my writing. And that was great.

I'm not against sentimentality. I think you need it. I mean, I don't think you get a true picture of people without it in writing... It's a kind of poetry, it's an emotional poetry, and, to bring it back to the literary scene, I don't think anything is true that doesn't have it, that doesn't have poetry in it.

I think the few writers who influenced me most in writing short stories are Alice Munro and Grace Paley. They're very different, and I can't do what they do, but reading them gives me hope that I'll learn something from them.