Writing Quotes - Page 665

Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing.

Anyone can see that to write Uncle Tom's Cabin on the knee in the kitchen, with constant calls to cooking and other details of housework to punctuate the paragraphs, was a more difficult achievement than to write it at leisure in a quiet room.

Writing is this act of faith - a bit like driving in the fog: you can hardly see just in front of you. But you trust God's leading you and you just write into the space you can see ahead of you.

If you're very serious about writing it's helpful to find an agent. It's becoming more and more competitive to have your manuscript even looked at by an editor. Many companies don't accept unsolicited manuscripts anymore, so they'll pay more attention to something that comes in through an agent.

I think the complaint that I hear most often from kids, even kids who like to write is that don't know what to write about. A journal is a great source of story starters.

Maybe one thing is that you have to find the best way to write whatever works better for you.

When I first started writing songs and being very explicit, it was hard, but one of the main things people respond to in my writing is that 'just say it' attitude of my songs. There really is nothing personal or private; it's all universal, if you can just find the courage to be open about your life.

Why do you think I write these feminist songs, to try and teach myself to respect myself. You know, it's not because I'm a hero.

The impulse to write a novel comes from a momentary unified vision of life.

A change of work is a good rest for the mind if you're constantly focused on writing. I like to work with timber and be creative on that side sometimes as well.

I've been writing and wanting to direct for a long time.

When you work with people and are friends with them also, you have more of a shorthand. I think people relax more and it opens the door to being less precious and trying things that, when you're shooting and writing, it becomes much more collaborative - therefore funny, hopefully.

I'm a fan of Ernest Hemingway work and specifically The Old Man and the Sea. I researched the relationship he had with the captain of his boat for 20 years, Gregorio Fuentes, and that inspired me to write a screenplay about it.

Rock n roll is what I would die for, but I love music and I love exploring, taking the challenge of playing, writing or singing... or producing.

I think if someone is writing continuously for 10 years and has not changed their mind about something - there's something wrong with them. They're not really thinking.

I shall try to write a poem that is about the moment but doesn't betray things that are true to me as a poet.

I am writing more than I have ever done. My life has come back to me in the most extraordinary way.

But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it's no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form; modern poets can, and do, do both.

But I can't and don't ever want to write bell-yanking confetti-tossing hat-throwing poems.

I write easily, let's put it that way. And in a novel particularly, the characters take over. And they tell me what to say and they tell me what they're doing. And I'm a third of the way into a novel and then I just let the characters finish it for me.

My favourite author is Leon Trotsky - the political philosophy and the way he writes is beautiful, and really relevant, too.

Writing is alchemy. Dross becomes gold. Experience is transformed. Pain is changed. Suffering may become song. The ordinary or horrible is pushed by the will of the writer into grace or redemption, a prophetic wail, a screed for justice, an elegy of sadness or sorrow. ... There is always a tension between experience and the thing that finally carries it forward, bears its weight, holds it in. Without that tension, one might as well write a shopping list.

One cannot simply decide to write apolitical poetry, in the way one decides to drink lemonade instead of tea, it's far more subliminal than that.

Short story writers simply do what human beings have always done. They write stories because they have to; because they cannot rest until they have tried as hard as they can to write the stories. They cannot rest because they are human, and all of us need to speak into the silence of mortality, to interrupt and ever so briefly stop that quiet flow, and with stories try to understand at least some of it.

Keeping a Diary all my life helped me to discover some basic elements essential to the vitality of writing.