Writing Quotes - Page 676

I do not believe that it is necessarily the duty of the writer to give a voice to his community. If a writer is true to his vocation, to his or her vocation, the very process of creativity enlarges these human horizons. It provides insights, even when you're not writing, when your writing's not dealing with a concrete political situation.

Writers throughout the ages have one weapon, which is literature, but they also have their responsibilities as a citizen when literature does not seem to suffice. I mean, they are not mutually exclusive. One continues to write anyway but if you are called out to demonstrate, if people are being killed in the streets, it's hardly the moment to go for your pen and paper, you know, help in one way or the other.

There is not a special imposition on writers to be activists. All that does is encourage writers to write propaganda.

By the age of nine I had a thorough knowledge of contemporary Polish literature as well as of foreign literature in Polish translation, and I began to write poems in honour of a lady of thirty years. Naturally, she knew nothing about them.

Everyone needs solitude, especially a person who is used to thinking about what she experiences. Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.

Men will forgive a man anything except bad prose.

I feel devoutly thankful to have been born fond of writing.

In all the twelve years I was at school no one ever succeeded in making me write a Latin verse or learn any Greek except the alphabet.

Out of intense complexities intense simplicities emerge. Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words when short are best of all.

I have not always been wrong. History will bear me out, particularly as I shall write that history myself.

It helps to write down half a dozen things which are worrying me. Two of them, say, disappear; about two of them nothing can be done, so it's no use worrying; and two perhaps can be settled.

Perfecting and selling your writing is a lifelong task. If you are a persistent writer, you can expect your abilities to improve with time. Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.

Writing ... it begins as an amusement, then it becomes a mistress, then a master, and finally a tyrant.

I binge-watched this show Damages. Glenn Close and Rose Byrne are so good. Lily Tomlin is in it. You see all these great actors and the writing is terrific. There are a lot of shows like that. And there are all these conversations right now about roles for women and being paid equally and all of that, but I think what it really is, is opportunity.

If you're a musician, you can practice your guitar every day and write songs, but when you're an actor, you can't just like burst into a monologue. Your only exercise is when you're in prep or you're working.

You look at people like Gena Rowlands, but she had [John] Cassavetes to write these amazing roles for her.

The only difficulty is to know what bits to choose and what to leave out. Novel-writing is not creation, it is selection.

I can't think why I was cursed with this inordinate desire to write, if the high gods weren't going to give me some more adquate means of expressing myself than that which my present pedestrian prose affords.

But to write - that is grief and labor; and to read what one has written - how unlike the story as one saw it; how dull, how spirtless - that is enough to send one weeping to bed.

I try not get too self-aware when writing lyrics.

A lot of artists write about the same things their whole career.

It would get really alienating, to have my face be the face of a cause. So much just comes down to the songs. I just want to give us the opportunity to write great songs. Even our work in Haiti is limited by how good our songs are. We just need to get rid of as much of the bullshit as possible, so we can have a life, so we have something to write about.

The reason I never wrote a novel is that I don't have what it takes to write characters, so they would all be talking differently. I lack that ability. If I were writing, they would all talk like me, and that's no good.

Writing from a character is really fun - sometimes you can be more honest through somebody else's perspective.

I would much rather not be the center of attention, and I'd much rather travel and be writing my novel, rather than standing on a stage and trying to get people to understand something.