Writing Quotes - Page 637

My father I liked, but it was only after his death that I got to know him by writing the play.

I don't like to be challenged in the way that often happens, where somebody writes something and then you, as an actor, are expected to really make it up in your imagination. That's not really an ideal way of working.

The day it comes out, there's already things that you start to go, 'Oh, I should have done that a little differently.' You start to make a list in your head. I actually write things down -- what I'm going to do next time.

The best style of writing, as well as the most forcible, is the plainest.

You have to write a lot. And you have to rewrite what you wrote a lot more.

When I first began writing In the Country of Men all I had was the voice of the protagonist. He intrigued me and my desire to want to know him and his world became almost compulsive.

I am of the firm opinion that no one should tell writers what to do, or what to write, or how to write.

Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing.

Some readers read a book as if it were an instruction manual, expecting to understand everything first time, but of course when you write, you put into every sentence an overflow of meaning, and you create in every sentence as many resonances and double meanings and ambiguities as you can possibly pack in there, so that people can read it again and get something new each time.

Somebody said, 'Hey, there is a lull in your career. Why don't you write books about your [dyslexia]?' We are currently writing our 34th novel.

Holy writing must strive (by all means) for perfection and true holiness, that a door may be opened to him in heaven.

What the young writer is looking for is not a critic who will slap him on the back and say, 'Greatest thing since O. Henry,' but rather the one who will toss the manuscript down in disgust, with 'You know better than that! It's rotten! Do it all over again!'

Words, sentences, ideas, no matter how subtle or ingenious, the maddest flights of poetry, the most profound dreams, the most hallucinating visions, are but crude hieroglyphs chiseled in pain and sorrow to commemorate an event which is untransmissible.

Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.

And the books you write. They're not you. They're not me sitting here, this Henry Miller. They belong to someone else. It's terrible. You can never rest.

The act of writing for the slave constituted the act of creating a public, historical self, not only the self of the individual author but also the self, as it were, of the race.

I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.

If I should certainly say to a novice, 'Write from experience and experience only,' I should feel that this was rather a tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add, 'Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.'

Writing is the only profession where nobody considers you ridiculous if you earn no money. Money is like an arm or a leg; use it or lose it.

Writing is a business and should be practiced as such. On days when you think you can’t possibly write a line you do it anyhow.

My wife gets mad because we'll be in the middle of something and I'll stop and say, 'No, I've got to write this down!' She'll say, 'No! We're in a discussion!' I say, 'I know, but it's hilarious!

I still don't think I have a vocation - and writing is a way of avoiding one.

Someday I would love to write about Vincent van Gogh - his paintings and letters continue to inspire me very much. But it remains hard to find the time and inner rest to write.

The deepest satisfaction of writing is precisely that it opens up new spaces within us of which we were not aware before we started to write. To write is to embark on a journey whose final destination we do not know.

There are cinéphiles and cinéphages. Truffaut is a cinéphile. A cinéphage - a film nerd - sits in the front row and writes down the credits. But if you ask him whether it's good, he'll say something sharp. But that's not the point of movies: to love cinema is to love life, to really look at this window on the universe. It's incompatible with note-taking!