Writing Quotes - Page 631

The next thing Jordana says makes me realize that it's too late to save her. "I've noticed that when you light a match, the flame is the same shape as a falling tear." She's been sensitized, turned gooey in the middle. I saw it happening and I didn't do anything to stop it. From now on, she'll be writing diaries and sometimes including little poems and she'll buy gifts for her favourite teachers and she'll admire the scenery and she'll watch the news and she'll buy soup for homeless people and she'll never burn my leg hair again.

There will be birds and if they write your name in the sky then you can get on the buses and if they don't you have to die on the floor.

Finding a writer who can write decent kids' dialog and finding kids that can act realistically and not 'cute' is an effort.

It's amazing to me that no matter what city, what state, no matter where I am, a woman will come up to me and say "Thank you, thank you" for writing the 1994 Violence Against Women Act, which funds services for victims and pushes to put more assailants behind bars.

One of the things that writing has taught me is that fiction has a life of its own. Fictional places are sometimes more real than the view from our bedroom window. Fictional people can sometimes become as close to us as our loved ones.

My advice would be not to write until after 35. You need some experience, and for life to knock you about a bit. Growing up is so hard you probably won't have much emotion to spare anyway.

Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh is one of the most beloved Buddhist teachers in the West, a rare combination of mystic, poet, scholar, and activist. His luminous presence and the simple, compassionate clarity of his writings have touched countless lives.

When you're writing fiction, you don't have notes necessarily. You don't carve it, it's not like a piece of sculpture, it's more like water color.

The impulse for much writing is homesickness. You are trying to get back home, and in your writing you are invoking that home, so you are assuaging the homesickness.

There is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic.

I wish it was clear for me how it happened [stop writing songs], then maybe I could start writing again. But it's kind of an "it." It just submerged itself. Because the way I had always written was just that it came out. It just happened.

If it came back I would be thrilled. I would be delighted to write more songs. I need them now because I want to make an album and I have to depend on other people's music, which I've done for years. But still, it'd be really nice to be able to sprinkle it with my own.

"Diamonds & Rust" started off as another song. Then the words started to morph. When you write a song that deep, the words come from some place else. But when the songs stop coming, it would be so contrived to try and force it. Since then I've just been doing other people's music.

I like to write a joke without any fat on it.The shorter the better. I cater for people with ADD, basically.

It’s all risk. And if it isn’t, it needs to be. The real trick is to find the risk that is right for you, a risk that doesn’t take you so far out of your own identity that it’s not a you that you recognize who’s doing the writing.

I write novellas because I don't like loose sprawling prose.

Charles Dickens was an incredibly cinematic writer. He wrote this one hundred years before there were movies. He writes very thematically. It is amazing.

I always have been introspective, since I was a little kid, since I could remember, I was sitting in a closet trying to write out the meaning of the universe. That's been my whole life.

Lifes That Way was an extraordinarily difficult book to write, because it wasnt written as a book. It was written as a journal of events that were happening as I wrote it, without the space or time either to digest or analyze those events and without the hindsight and peace that writing in the aftermath would have provided.

Writing is a really good first step toward that goal of knowing yourself.

There are no accusations with writing, no judgment, no shame, only freedom.

If I stopped writing and being at my piano, I wouldn't know how to live. It's your best friend.

Faithfulness to the past can be a kind of death above ground. Writing of the past is a resurrection; the past then lives in your words and you are free.

Writing is so difficult that I feel that writers, having had their hell on earth, will escape all punishment hereafter.

I suppress in my prose any language which calls attention to itself.