Writing Quotes - Page 627

Everything I write tends to turn into a superhero team, even if I didn't mean for it to. I always start off wanting to be solitary, because a) it's simpler, and b) that isolation is something that I relate to as a storyteller. And then no matter what, I always end up with a team.

I always try to write about something that's actually happened or it doesn't always have to have happened to me, but it has to have happened at some point. So every single lyric that you hear comes from some kind of story that I've come across in my life. I like to think that that maybe helps me mean it a bit more and if you don't mean it, it ceases to be soul music.

Memoir is a unique opportunity to revisit yourself. I don't mean by memory. I mean in the revision process. You don't just write a chapter and that's it. You must constantly return to it. You must dote on it. And even if it's saying something ugly about who you are, you have to find the poetry in it. You have to find the poetry in yourself.

It is forgetting, not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human. To make sense of the world, we must filter it. "To think," Borges writes, "is to forget.

It is hard to write even the smallest piece of code correctly.

Everybody said, You hit it so big when you were on Ally McBeal. I didnt do anything for a year after Ally McBeal, and I had to write David Kelley to get myself back on Ally a second time because I thought the character should be on again.

The more you write, the faster you'll write, and the less you'll mind throwing stuff out.

And then, once you've written, you meet producers and directors and actors. You get to meet interesting, talented, creative, artistic people, and it also staves off a bit of creative stagnation when you can't act, which is the reality of the industry. So often, you can't act because there are just too many cars and not enough car parks. But, I love writing and I'll never stop doing that.

Then, like a born and bred asshole, he added to the sheriff, "He writes murder mysteries.

Seneca devoted much of his time to writing essays in praise of poverty, and in lending money at usurious rates.

We have some writers so abstruse and deep that they drown themselves in their fathomless sentences.

You write to help yourself think better, then think to help yourself write better.

It is vain to try and hide a bad spirit from the eyes of them who are spiritual, for it will show itself in speaking and in writing as well as in all other conduct, it is also useless to make great pretensions when the heart is not right before God, for God looks at the heart, and where the heart is not right the Lord will expose it to the view of the faithful.

If what you want to do is write, then it's madness not to do it.

After he made up his mind to spend the rest of the war in the hospital, Yossarian wrote letters to everyone he knew saying that he was in the hospital but never mentioning why. One day he had a better idea. To everyone he knew he wrote that he was going on a very dangerous mission. "They asked for volunteers. It's very dangerous, but someone has to do it. I'll write you the instant I get back." And he had not written anyone since.

I write longhand and I type and I rewrite on the typed pages.

The smartest people in Washington are the political reporters. They write about their inferiors.

A journal is a very personal thing. As far as possible, to write this sort of book you need to know and feel your character as a person and then put yourself into that person's mind, place and time. Trying to stay in that person, place and time is a challenge when surrounded by this very different world of the 21st century.

I didn't want to be either the cre`me de la cre`me or a martyr. I'd rather be a novelty, especially in a democracy that doesn't understand the language I write in.

No man writes a book without meaning something, though he may not have the faculty of writing consequentially and expressing his meaning.

To this end, nothing is to be more carefully consulted than plainness. In a lady's attire this is the single excellence; for to be what some people call fine, is the same vice, in that case, as to be florid is in writing or speaking.

People might ask me, What do you propose instead? I propose nothing. I am a mere novelist, I just write about the world as I see it. It is not my job to transform it. I cannot transform it all by myself, and I wouldn't even know how to. I limit myself to saying what I believe the world to be.

The wisest man I ever knew in my whole life could not read or write.

We did meet forty years ago. At that time we were both influenced by Whitman and I said, jokingly in part, 'I don't think anything can be done in Spanish, do you?' Neruda agreed, but we decided it was too late for us to write our verse in English. We'd have to make the best of a second-rate literature.

When I feel I'm going to write something, then I just am quiet and I try to listen. Then something comes through. And I do what I can in order not to tamper with it.