Writing Quotes - Page 689

I write my scripts short and they develop on the set, which I have found a far better premise both economically and practically.

Sometimes you don’t know what you're writing until you've finished it.

If there had been a censorship of the press in Rome we should have had today neither Horace nor Juvenal, nor the philosophical writings of Cicero.

I get a lot of emails where people are writing me their experiences, how they discovered my music, what they feel... they motivate me to carry on with what I am doing.

It was an interesting thing to do. Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of the pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message; I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions.

Even while writing his book, he had become painfully aware how little he knew his own planet while attempting to piece together another one from jagged bits filched from deranged brains.

Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them.

My loathings are simple. stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.

The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading

When the whole world is writing letters, it's easy to lap into the quiet within, tell the story of an hour, keep alive the narrating inner life. To be alone in the presence of one's thought is not a value, only a common practice.

What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.

They may recognize themselves in what you're writing, and then they have to say, "Well, she doesn't see me as I see myself." All a writer has is her own experience, and that experience comes out of human relationships.

I was never an activist, in the sense that I didn't really join a lot of organizations. I wasn't out in the streets. But what I did become was a writer. My activism was in writing.

You can't reduce an actual human being; you're just writing! You're not doing anything to another person.

The memoirist, like the poet and the novelist, must engage the world, because engagement makes experience, experience makes wisdom, and finally it's the wisdom-or rather the movement toward it-that counts.

What you feel when you're writing is the relief of thinking: if you write the sentence correctly, you're clarifying. If you write the right sentence, nothing feels as good.

Writing about racism requires a directness that writing a love story does not.

I always work with text orally in the writing process, saying passages aloud to measure flow.

My intention was never to write a "trans novel" - which is perhaps an effective strategy for writing a trans novel.

When I was writing, I wanted every word to be not only deliberate, but musical. Precious.

I became much more interested in plot when I really didn't consider myself a writer anymore. When I was in an art context and I started to do installations, that was when writing of mine almost returned to fiction. Earlier I felt like I didn't have anything to write about, I could only concentrate on the page, I could only concentrate on words.

I was starting to recognize a corner I was driving myself into: that all writing could do was refer to things that had already been written. I'm making the margin, but the margin of a book that already exists. I was having this exhilaration at, but at the same time horror of this recognition that I'd driven myself into the world of only books. This is a world of the previously written, and maybe I don't have to add to it, maybe all I can do is measure it.

I always thought, I can't waste time, I have to do work. I also thought that I was slower than other people, that I had to concentrate more. I always thought, I'm not brilliant, I have to work. That was something I embedded in myself very early: I have to go home and write. But did I get any more work done than people like Frank O'Hara, who were always going to parties? Probably not.

[On writing:] The most egotistic of occupations, and the most gratifying while it lasts.

Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least weighty is the choice of the moment at which to begin his novel.