Writing Quotes - Page 636

Everyone has a story, the air is full of stories. The creative process is mysterious, I don't know why it is that suddenly a theme will take hold of me and refuse to leave me in peace until I investigate it and write it.

No complaining about how hard it is to write, we are all so, so lucky to write, to sit down, inside, and write words on paper. There is no greater freedom, no greater good, nothing that brings more joy.

We write not only for children but also for their parents. They, too, are serious children.

A story to me must have some surprise...I must have a passion to write the story.

When I sit down at the typewriter, I write. Someone once asked me if I had a fixed routine before I start, like setting up exercises, sharpening pencils, or having a drink of orange juice. I said, "No, the only thing I do before I start writing is to make sure that I'm close enough to the typewriter to reach the keys."

I have never written a book that didn't teach me far more than it taught my reader.

I made up my mind long ago to follow one cardinal rule in all my writing — to be clear.

Thinking is the activity I love best, and writing to me is simply thinking through my fingers. I can write up to 18 hours a day. Typing 90 words a minute, I've done better than 50 pages a day. Nothing interferes with my concentration. You could put an orgy in my office and I wouldn't look up-well, maybe once.

When people start writing there is this idea that you have to get everything right first time, every sentence has to be perfect, every paragraph has to be perfect, every chapter has to be perfect, but what youre doing is not any kind of public show, until youre ready for it.

You write people as human beings first and then the gender specific stuff second.

I can recite poetry, but I cannot write it.

The sending of a letter constitutes a magical grasp upon the future.

Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a direction you don't expect.

The situation is not good with the record companies. It's just not working out, so I don't plan to record until it's straightened out. In the meantime I'm happy doing my movies and writing the music for the theme songs, whether I sing them or not.

It's important for me to get back to my fans here and around the world. I feel very, very blessed that so many people have continued to write me and to pour out their love for me and my work.

Were I to write what I know, the book would be too sensational to print, but were I to write what I think proper, it would be too dull to read.

And for so long, I had thought if I was going to write a song, or get "into" something, I had to at least smoke a joint or something. And that didn't work anymore. Once I was fairly well cleaned out, even a little bit of a drug getting into my work threw me off kilter.

You know, I say in my lyrics, "Every word I write will be analyzed by somebody white." It's just that I know that this sh*t is just not gonna fall on deaf ears.

You become a writer on a television show, and you see yourself doing bigger and better things, you don't wait till they tell you, "Here's the way to do bigger and better things," you start writing. You start writing that material that you might be doing off to the side. Nobody's going to be paying you for that, but it could turn into something big.

The only equivalent plunge from genius I could think of was Ernest Hemmingway's tragic loss of ability to write. Hemmingway got up one morning and shot himself. Nicklaus got up the next morning and shot 66.

I love short stories - reading and writing them. The best short stories distill all the potency of a novel into a small but heady draught. They are perfect reading material for the bus or train or for a lunchtime break. Everything extraneous has been strained off by the author. The best short stories pack the heft of any novel, yet resonate like poetry.

I don't have many friends. It's not because I'm a misanthrope. It's because I'm reserved. I'm self-contained. I get all my adventures in my head when I'm writing my books.

The natural way of ensuring that the past continues to live in the present and to inform the future is to write it down.

Everything I write has a precedent in truth.

It's just a freak of fate that I'm paid to write, not paying to print my own books - but I'd be doing it anyway: it's my life.