Writing Quotes - Page 663

The most important thing about writing a book is having book parties.

I'm working when I'm fighting with my wife. I constantly ask myself-how can I use this stuff to literary advantage.

One of the least impressive liberties is the liberty to starve. This particular liberty is freely accorded to authors.

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking.

Writing a poem is making music with words and space.

I procrastinate, and I push writing to the last available moment, because I don't like to settle on anything. I guess you can call it indecision or you can call it holding out for inspiration.

It is a great paradox and a great injustice that writers write because we fear death and want to leave something indestructible in our wake and, at the same time, are drawn to all the things that kill: whiskey and cigarettes, unprotected sex, and deep-fried burritos.

Former South Africa President Nelson Mandela announced Tuesday he will begin writing his autobiography. He spent 25 years in prison before being elected to public office. In America, we do it the other way around.

Maybe poetry's not so important, but ... it makes life worth living.

In a sense, journalism can be both helpful and detrimental to a writer of fiction because the kind of writing you need to do as a journalist is so different. It has to be clear, unambiguous, concise, and as a writer often you are trying to do things that are more ambiguous. I find that writing fiction is often an antidote to reading and writing too much journalism.

I don't just strictly sample. I build. I'm a musician: I play piano and drums, I read notes, I write music.

When I look at commercial studios, I think, "Oh, they're all so nice and tidy," but it's because they don't actually write music in them.

I get caught up in my bubble of reading, writing, or music.

If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there.

Is it our job to judge? The gendarme, policemen and bureaucrats have been especially prepared by fate for that job. Our job is towrite, and only to write.

The critics suppose that it is easy to write a play. They aren't aware that writing a good play is difficult and writing a bad one is twice as hard.

I let myself go at the beginning and write with an easy mind, but by the time I get to the middle I begin to grow timid and to fear my story will be too long. . .That is why the beginning of my stories is always very promising and looks as though I were starting on a novel, and the middle is huddled and timid, and the end is...like fireworks.

Anyone who says the artist's field is all answers and no questions has never done any writing or had any dealings with imageryYou are confusing two concepts: answering the questions and formulating them correctly. Only the latter is required of an author.

A writer should not so much write as embroider on paper; the work should be painstaking, laborious.

Right now in American writing there is no genre as exciting as memoir - the writer can do anything, as long as it works. It's like the 1920s up in this joint. So, I'd say, experiment with how you tell the story. In the best memoir it's not the what, it's how the writer tells the what - meaning and effect through form.

The best journalism is sometimes about footnotes—when we write small to say something big.

I'm a poet. I'm just a renaissance man in my heart. I can build shelves and I can write poetry.

About a year after I moved to Los Angeles, I decided I wanted to be a joke writer for a late night talk show. So I met with a late night joke writer and he told me that I should start by doing stand-up comedy, because that would really hone my sense of humor and joke writing ability. Eventually I took a stand-up class and a few months later I had a seven-minute act.

On Twitter, when someone would die, I would write a joke. Or if there's a tragedy, I would write a joke and tweet it. That was my thing, and then at a certain point, people started demanding it.

…my life has been a remarkable one. Maybe one day someone will write a book about me . . .” "I’ve never much cared for horror stories.