Writing Quotes - Page 656

I was kind of an outcast in school 'cause I always kept to myself and was writing poetry and then going on tour with my brother band all the time, so kids didn't know what to make of me.

If it is a distinction to have written a good book, it is also a disgrace to have written a bad one.

I always wanted to be an independent maverick, writing plays and putting them on myself.

When I set out to write a screenplay, I have in my mind a beginning and an end but that end part continually changes as I start to write the middle. That way by the time the screenplay is finished I have taken myself and my audience from a familiar beginning point through the story to an unfamiliar ending point.

My literary criticism has become less specifically academic. I was really writing literary history in The New Poetic, but my general practice of writing literary criticism is pretty much what it always has been. And there has always been a strong connection between being a writer - I feel as though I know what it feels like inside and I can say I've experienced similar problems and solutions from the inside. And I think that's a great advantage as a critic, because you know what the writer is feeling.

When I'm writing songs, I write visually. When I'm writing the words down and I listen to the melody and the lyrics, I start seeing the video form. And if I can get through a song and from the beginning to the end have the whole video in my mind, I think that's a great song.

I'm not a very spiritual guy when it comes to music. I remember hearing Carlos Santana say that angels helped him write his songs. And I thought, 'Really, angels?

Screenwriting Joe Eszterhas have always talked about the charm of evil.

Jokes that make me laugh out loud when I write them almost always bomb. I have no idea why.

Whether I'm in front of the camera, behind the camera, at my computer writing a novel or a screenplay, as long as I get to entertain someone out there, I'm happy.

Always being myself and my salve, which is life. I’m not lonely, if that’s what it seems like. Always writing things down.

Just the fact that there's motion and sound, took me a long time on Walking Dead to get used to the fact that in television, characters don't have to say things. In comics, people have to say I feel this way, or I want to do this, and you can do so much with gesture and movement and facial expressions that you can do sometimes facial expression stuff in comics, but you can do so more if somebody can move around without actually speaking. That leads to a different style of writing between the two mediums.

I think that most writers who are trying to write important and difficult books are in many ways putting their own humanity into question. Sometimes the journey is finding out where you stand in relationship to your own humanity and to the humanity of others.

Unless I'm writing in the Igbo language, I use a language developed elsewhere, which is English. That affects the way I write. It even affects to some extent the stories I write.

If someone said, I want to translate your novel into Igbo, I would say, Go ahead. But when I write in the Igbo language, I write my own dialect. I write some poetry in that dialect.

I wouldn't have wanted anyone to teach me how to write. That's my own taste. I prefer to stumble on it.

If I write novels in a country in which most citizens are illiterate, who then is my community?

If the government doesn't fund education, which they often don't, students are going to stay home and not go to school. It affects them directly. But I'm really not interested in writing explicitly about that. I'm really interested in human beings, and in love, and in family. Somehow, politics comes in.

The real middle class India that has always been looking for a voice that is its very own. I write about it because I belong to it.

I hope when people ask what you're going to do with your English degree and/or creative writing degree you'll say: Continue my bookish examination of the contradictions and complexities of human motivation and desire; or maybe just: Carry it with me, as I do everything that matters. And then smile very serenely until they say, Oh.

I read the reviews sometimes, but I don't let it really affect the next album because, for me, when I approach an album, it's usually coming to me pretty naturally. It's not like I set out, like, "Okay, I'm going to write an album this month." It's more like I'm just always writing songs and eventually I start to realize that a group of songs sort of fits together, and I go from there in putting together the album and themes and artwork and things like that.

I thought that if no one was going to give me a great part - and it was very difficult to break into film, obviously - then I'd write one myself.

Even though I'm not privileged in the money world, I'm privileged in other ways: I had greater access to education, I can travel, etc. It's the same with writing: the freedom to move in and out of different places, of different realms of existence, of different life forms.

It's difficult for me to write in English as it's not my first language, but French is even worse because of my father's influence and because the comparisons that I - not even other people - would make.

As I'm writing, I start to see connections, and themes I didn't see, and that sparks other things. So then I go back and rewrite things or alter them. It's a combination of intuition and a lot of finessing. It becomes a combination of the rational and the irrational.