Writing Quotes - Page 616

When I'm happiest writing is just not knowing where it goes and just let the characters bring you there.

A theologian should be thoroughly in possession of the basis and source of faith--that is to say, the Holy Scriptures. Armed with this knowledge it was that I confounded and silenced all my adversaries; for they seek not to fathom and understand the Scriptures; they run them over negligently and drowsily; they speak, they write, they teach, according to the suggestion of their heedless imaginations.

Many have been deceived by outward appearances and have proceeded to write and teach about good works and how they justify without even mentioning faith.... Wearying themselves with many works, they never come to righteousness.

The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing.

I did not learn my theology all at once, but had to search constantly deeper and deeper for it. My temptations did that for me, for no one can understand Holy Scripture without practice and temptations...I t is not by reading, writing, or speculation that one becomes a theologian. Nay, rather, it is living, dying, and being damned that makes one a theologian.

Songwriting is a mysterious art. When I sit down to write a song, the end result should be mysterious and have this dark quality.

Like with anything, good writing suggest itself pretty strongly.

We live in the age of mass loquacity.We are all writing it or at any rate talking it: the memoir, the apologia, the c.v., the cri de coeur.

When things are going well, you do have the sense that what you’re writing is being fed to you in some way. Auden compared writing a poem to cleaning an old piece of slate until the letters appear. The only way you could reveal your god is perhaps under hypnosis. It’s sacred and it’s secret, even to the writer.

All novelists write in a different way, but I always write in longhand and then do two versions of typescript on a computer.

It's been said that happiness writes white. It doesn't show up on the page. When you're on holiday and writing a letter home to a friend, no one wants a letter that says the food is good and the weather is charming and the accommodations comfortable. You want to hear about lost passports and rat-filled shacks.

The process of writing a novel begins with a pang, a moment of recognition, and a situation, a character, or something you read in a paper, that seems to go off, like a solar flare inside your head.

I would say that the writers I like and trust have at the base of their prose something called the English sentence. An awful lot of modern writing seems to me to be a depressed use of language. Once, I called it "vow-of-poverty prose." No, give me the king in his countinghouse. Give me Updike.

You have to stop living in order to write.

It's a good thing that we're protected by tenure and academic freedom, but we should realize that it creates a risk of getting cut off. Scholars should write, at least sometimes, for the general public.

People who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief.

Well, my book is written-let it go. But if it were only to write over again there wouldn't be so many things left out. They burn in me; and they keep multiplying; but now they can't ever be said. And besides, they would require a library-and a pen warmed up in hell.

You need not expect to get your book right the first time.

In Austria an editor who can write well is valuable, but he is not likely to remain so unless he can handle a sabre with charm.

If I'd seen a playwright ever write an' play at the same time, I'd have given 'em more of a chance at cards. Can I get an 'amen?'

Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention.

I became really aware that when you're making a movie, you're making it three times. You're making it when you're writing it. You're making it when you're shooting it. And then you're remaking it again when you're editing it.

The title's so upfront. It gives fair warning about the play's content. I'm writing about a kind of disenchantment, an anger, but quite a cool 90's anger, at a time when we're not very good at openly being angry. . . . I don't think I ever thought the title was titillating. I thought it was incredibly catchy. If the play is about the reduction in human relations down to a consumerist rationale, then thematically, the title is entirely linked into the thesis of the play.

Pretty much all comic-book people, like all Hollywood people, for the most part, are pretty liberal. I think especially UK writers. Alan Moore is probably the most radical guy you'll ever meet. I grew up loving those guys, so my heroes, as a kid, were radical cartoonists, essentially. I couldn't help but - I grew up in a left-wing household. But I do think it's fun, writing right-wing characters. I've found it interesting, just as a writer, to get inside their heads and make them likeable.

It takes me forever to write songs most of the time.