Writing Quotes - Page 612

Dissident Natan Sharansky writes that there are two kinds of states - “fear societies” and “free societies.”… The two societies make up two kinds of consciousness. The consciousness derived of oppression is despairing, fatalistic, and fearful of inquiry. It is mistrustful of the self and forced to trust external authority. It is premised on a dearth of self-respect. It is cramped … In contrast, the consciousness of freedom … is one of expansiveness, trust of the self, and hope. It is a consciousness of limitless inquiry … It builds up in a citizen a wealth of self-respect.

Noah Baumbach writing is really wonderful. I think the way he plays out each character with a unique voice is really impressive, and rhythmically his dialogue works.

Only a God of love is fully personal. Thus the Trinity is crucial for maintaining a fully personal concept of God. As theologian Robert Letham writes, “Only a God who is triune can be personal.... A solitary monad cannot love and, since it cannot love, neither can it be a person.” Therefore it “has no way to explain or even to maintain human personhood.

There's a hardening of the culture. Reality TV has lowered the standards of entertainment. You're left wondering about the legitimacy of relationships. It's probably harder to entertain the same people with a more classic form of writing, and romantic comedies are a classic genre.

Sometimes when I'm writing I'll play Cole Porter, just because the rhythms and the lyrics are so perfect that it's like having a smart partner in the room. I have a huge collection of music that I listen to when I'm writing, and I also prepare a lot of music before I start directing. I put it all onto an iPod that I have with me on the set. It's helpful to the actors, because for an emotional scene, I'll play it and say, this is how it feels, to keep us in the zone.

I didn't make any money from my writing until much later. I published about 80 stories for nothing. I spent on literature.

Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.

Writer's block — so what? Write something bad. Just throw it in the trash can when you're done, you're always improving. That kind of writing is like doing a bunch of push-ups. Every individual push-up is not the important thing. On Tuesday you're going to think, "Is it really important that I do it today?" No, but the collective impact is. If you write every day, you will improve.

Do not slip into writing for the mind and the mind alone. In other words, do not play merely upon our ability to reason. And do not focus only on visuals. Write for the whole person.

There are people, of course, who profess to be libertarian Marxists. I believe they mean very well, and I even write in their periodicals; but I write very militantly that I regard Marxism as a very subtle form of what I would call the totalitarian ideology - all the more subtle because it professes to advance the notions of freedom.

Unfortunately, I have dedicated great effort to the task of compiling this ‘sensitive words glossary,’ and I have mastered my filtering skills. I knew which words and sentences had to be cut, and I accepted the cutting as if that was the way it should be. In fact, I will often take it on myself to save time and cut a few words. I call this ‘castrated writing’ - I am a proactive eunuch, I have already castrated myself before the surgeon raises his scalpel.

One writes in order to feel.

And I've always worked on the principle that if it interests me enough to write about it, then it must interest a lot of other people.

There is only one trait that makes the writer. He is always watching.

I think that's the hardest part for an artist is finding their voice and learning how to write, finding what they have to say that is unique.

When I'm really plugged in I find it difficult to write. It's like digging a well. If you make a void, something moves in to fill it. Writing books is like that. It's mostly about freeing up time, doing nothing, and in that time some writing starts to happen. We need to figure out how to maintain those voids.

Writing a novel is like an amusement park or a museum or a city. You go into that place and you have certain experiences and those experiences, hopefully, have some impact on you.

If your book is set in the plantation days of the slave-owning South and you write a little romance between two slave owners without acknowledging the system they live, that's a political gesture.

As the great philosopher George Santayana would have said, 'those who cannot remember the past . . . should simply read Jan Van Meter's Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.' Van Meter's greatest hits collection of slogans is the catchiest ever retelling of American history. It's like the greatest minds of Madison Avenue sat down to write a history book. They don't make sound bites like they used to!

The most important thing is to write material that YOU think is funny. If you don't think it's funny, but you're convinced that other people will think it is, well they won't.

For me, writing music is a way of processing the world. It's not a concrete thing, as in, "This piece is about giraffes." It's much more of an emotional sort of thing. I want people to find something out about themselves through my music, something that was inaccessible before, something that they were suppressing, something that they couldn't really confront.

The writing is the springboard for your intuitive stuff and then you see, maybe a colour of what you want to achieve. Then you bring in the technique you've learnt. But when you're on film, you're not always in control of that. That's what makes me believe in a kind of collective unconscious, a sort of experience you draw on.

Even with college, the reason I wanted to go so badly is because I wanted to major in film. I want to take screenwriting classes and learn more about behind the scenes stuff, because I love people like Steve Carell and Kristen Wiig who are able to write a lot of their own material and be so involved in everything they do.

I was told many times that my writing was either too Korean - or not Korean enough.

I think that, that it would be hard for New Hampshire to vote for somebody who was a fundamentalist minister, affable as he is. He does seem to actually want to write, for example, a prohibition against abortion into the Constitution , which Ronald Reagan, for all his talking about it, never tried to do one time.