Writing Quotes - Page 674

When I was 4 years old my mother put me into an early music education school. That's where they taught you perfect pitch and harmony and how to write music and all that. At that time, one of the homeworks was to listen to all the sounds and the noise of a day and transfer that into musical notes.

If a woman writes about a domestic situation, everyone automatically assumes that it's about her.

Why do I write about China? That is a very good question. I think there are questions about China that I haven't been able to answer. The reason I write is that there are questions to which I want to find answers - or I want to find questions beyond those questions.

Horrible that you could write in a language so well, but have nothing meaningful to say.

You can write about a country without taking a stand, but you cannot write about a country without noting that there's history, and that there's politics going on. To me, that's the same if you write about America. You don't have to write about politics, but the politics have to be present in the characters.

None of us older writers had gone through such a school. We are all self-taught. And, of course, there is always, in such a school, the danger of goose-stepping, uniformed ranks. But the Serapion Brethren have already, it seems to me, outgrown this danger. Each of them has his own individuality and his own handwriting. The common thing they have derived from the studio is the art of writing with ninety-proof ink, the art of eliminating everything that is superfluous, which is, perhaps, more difficult than writing.

The art of the word is painting + architecture + music.

Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.

By the time you finish touring the record, everything that's exciting to me is what's ahead of me. I want to write the next paragraph.

Not being able to read and write music is not the same as being illiterate in speech and writing.

While most of the music I write is instrumental, I love to use the human voice as another instrument.

Just do it. Get it down on the page. Work hard. And then let go. Ask yourself why you want to write. You have to be clear about that.

If you write genre fiction, you follow the rules, and you have to follow them because readers expect that.

I am not a particularly natural writer. I am not a person who can write in paragraphs the way some writers do. For me, it's sentence by sentence, sometimes word-by-word. And I revise constantly. It's a very laborious process, but I love doing it.

I write down inspirational things on cards that I keep in my bag and look at during the round.

When one is writing a letter, he should think that the recipient will make it into a hanging scroll.

It's not a choice. Either I write or I don't, especially when I'm in a foreign culture. I've lived in London for years, and I must continue my writing and filmmaking. The most important thing for an artist or an author is to continue her work. Languages and settings are the tools but not the first thing.

I didn’t even know I could write music, but somehow Walt did. He tapped my hidden talents.

I want to direct films, because I am a painter and a sculptor and I've done a lot of writing.

I'll write down and catalogue all the different devices that are Americana to me, and I try to have a historic depth and breadth and also the things that we do in our time, the type of vamps and chants, things that are available to us.

I get very selfish at times. I write about things that are interesting to me. Which are often very different. All of these stories, the thing they have in common is that they were somehow interesting. I feel like they're all dispatches from a worldview.

I have a suspicion, because if you look at the whole, all the [Star Wars ] movies, the backlog of every one of these movies, there's a lot of great stuff, but one might not be not as good with the writing in this or the acting in that or the directing in that, this has great actors, great directors, great script, and I really feel like we're gonna make the best one [movie with Young Han Solo].

I wish I was writing something much more heavy each time I did a film, and that the comedies just occasionally come out. But unfortunately you're stuck with what you're born with.

To be a film director is not a democracy, it's really a tyranny. You're the head of the project, for better rather than worse. I write the film and I direct the film, I decide who's going to be in it, I decide on the editing, I put in the music from my own record collection.

The comedies are not a million laughs on the set. Its business and the dramas are business as well, really. When I'm writing it I struggle more with drama because I started out in comedy.