Writing Quotes - Page 619

When I write my book, Ill tell the real story of Cheryl

The best morals kids get from any book is just the capacity to empathize with other people, to care about the characters and their feelings. So you don't have to write a preachy book to do that. You just have to make it a fun book with characters they care about, and they will become better people as a result.

I jog in the morning and then write for about two hours. There are times when I'm really excited and can't wait to get back to it. But there are days when I don't know what's coming next, and I really have to force it.

One day I was speeding along at the typewriter, and my daughter - who was a child at the time - asked me, "Daddy, why are you writing so fast?" And I replied, "Because I want to see how the story turns out!

The Jackass movies are honestly some of the best movies I've ever seen. I laugh so hard at them. Those guys are geniuses. If they had grown up with a different group of people, they could've been performance artists at Bard College, and people would be writing papers about them.

I may well do some more polemical writing, if a subject that fires me up comes along. Apart from that possibility, I would like to continue to tell stories so long as I have stories to tell.

You can't ask me to explain the lyrics because I won't do it.

Raymond Chandler managed to write about L.A. his whole career. Should I keep going writing about New York? Is that what I should be doing? Songwriting doesn't work that way.

I'm writing about real things. Real people. Real characters. You have to believe what I write about is true or you wouldn't pay any attention at all.

the compulsion to read and write - and it seems to me it should be, even must be, a compulsion - is a bit of mental wiring the species has selected, over time, in order, as the life span increases, to keep us interested in ourselves.

Never write down your speeches beforehand; if you do, you may perhaps be a good declaimer, but will never be a debater.

I can hardly bring myself to caution you against drinking, because I am persuaded that I am writing to a rational creature, a gentleman, and not to a swine. However, that you may not be insensibly drawn into that beastly custom of even sober drinking and sipping, as the sots call it, I advise you to be of no club whatsoever.

In general I do not draw well with literary men -- not that I dislike them but I never know what to say to them after I have praised their last publication.

For me, writing is more a process of discovering the book than planning it.

I have the skills to pay the bills; you know, I can really sing, and write great songs.

It's funny, I write lyrics in a bizarre way - I'm always writing lyrics, mostly when we're traveling or walking around New York, that's when I'm writing most of the stuff.

I've got pages and pages of snippets of stuff, and if Max [Hershenow] sends me a track to write to I'll go through all the stuff and the initial reaction of gut and how it makes me feel and I'll sort of go from there and start pulling my favourite pieces of my lyrics and that will be a very literal word collage and from there I'll sculpt it for and whatever reason the song sort of presents itself. It's a bizarre process.

I've heard the government say many nice things. But it did make some gestures, like writing human rights protection into the constitution - that surprised me. And it improved the conditions for foreign journalists: It used to be impossible for you to meet with me personally. But there still hasn't been a real improvement in the human rights situation.

When I write, it's purging for me. It's a therapeutic process.

In order to handle my emotional pain I talk to friends about it, I write, I breathe, and most of all, I put it in perspective.

[Children] would have messed up my apartment. In the main, they are ungrateful. They would have siphoned too much time away from the writing of my precious books.

Even if I couldn't get my early novels published, I could still write. I went into newspapers, where I got paid to write every day. If there's a better school for would-be novelists, I don't know what it is.

These days, my subjects are murder and mayhem and other terrible things that happen to people - things that are even worse than cutting yourself shaving. And these are not the sorts of things you feel the need to experience before you write about them.

When I was in my early 20s, my dream was to write mystery novels. I wanted to do what my favourite crime writer, Ross Macdonald, did - crank out a book a year. The only problem - and it was a considerable one - was that I stank.

Real quality means making sure that people are proud of the code they write, that they're involved and taking it personally.