Writing Quotes - Page 696

I came into science fiction at a very good time, when the doors were getting thrown open to all kinds of more experimental writing, more literary writing, riskier writing. It wasn't all imitation Heinlein or Asimov. And of course, women were creeping in, infiltrating. Infesting the premises.

Whenever they tell me children want this sort of book and children need this sort of writing, I am going to smile politely and shut my earlids. I am a writer, not a caterer. There are plenty of caterers. But what children most want and need is what we and they don't know they want and don't think they need, and only writers can offer it to them.

Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That's the truth!

Safety lies in catering to the in-group. We are not all brave. All I would ask of writers who find it hard to question the universal validity of their personal opinions and affiliations is that they consider this: Every group we belong to - by gender, sex, race, religion, age - is an in-group, surrounded by an immense out-group, living next door and all over the world, who will be alive as far into the future as humanity has a future. That out-group is called other people. It is for them that we write.

I don't think I would do better books if I wrote full time. I write for amateurish reasons.

So much better to write pen on paper; you can do it anywhere, say, while stuck at the airport.

I write stories about conspiracies and paranoid characters while I am, in fact, a very skeptical person.

Once you reach your fifties, you have to stop being interested in the present and write only on Elizabethan poets.

There must be a connection between the lust for power and impotentia coeundi. I liked Marx, I was sure that he and his Jenny had made love merrily. You can feel it in the easy pace of his prose and in his humor. On the other hand, I remember remarking one day in the corridors of the university that if you screwed Krupskaya all the time, you'd end up writing a lousy book like Materialism and Empiriocriticism.

I started to write [The Name of the Rose] in March of 1978, moved by a seminal idea. I wanted to poison a monk.

Conspiracies and all the theories of conspiracy are a part of the canon of fakes. And I'm involved, in all of my writings, the theoretical ones as well as the novels, with the production of fakes.

Socrates ... did not write. It seems academically obvious that he perished because he did not publish!

That's the wonderful thing about drama and writing and fiction: it's this wonderful shared experience that we all have. We can see into each other's lives.

I don't take part in texting and those other things myself, so I don't really know if people put as much thought into messaging as they used to into writing letters.

I try not to take on the weight or the burden of it. Once it's on the paper, I try to leave it, because I want to surrender to what I'm supposed to write about.

I think one of the reasons that I love the fans that have stuck around, because I really enjoy writing different kinds of songs. I don't know if I write them well or not, but I can write them.

As an independent artist it is so easy to get caught up in websites, social media, merchandise, when I am going to put out an EP, fining a producer, finding a studio to record in and you have to remember at the end of the day you should be writing music.

A lot of people can figure out the social media aspect of it, or the merchandising aspect, or whatever and get enough momentum to start a career. To sustain it, you have to keep writing and you have to keep creating.

It's like a dream sometimes, a song just pops into your head and you can't tell if it's something you heard or it's new and you got to write it down.

Sometimes it could be just during the day, when I'm riding in the car or on the plane. I'll hear somebody say something that strikes a chord and I write it down and write bars at a time, and then when I'm in the studio I go to those bars and I'm like, "Maybe I should make a song about this."

I write. I have read a great deal. I enjoy books. I like the wit of languages. Even French I like. I like to be able to think in different modes. I like to be able to use the language a great deal and carry on rehearsals in French.

The thing that bothers me is that it seems like all the sensitive stuff I write just goes unnoticed . . . the media doesn't get who I am at all. Or maybe they just can't accept it. It doesn't fit into those negative stories they like to write. I'm the kind of guy who is moved by a song like Don McLean's "Vincent," that one about Van Gogh. The lyric on that song is so touching. That's how I want to make my songs feel. Take "Dear Mama" - I aimed that one straight for my homies' heartstrings.

I only wrote one song in jail. But I'm writing new album - you're going to feel the entire 11 months of what I went through on this album. I'm venting my anger.

Between writing, traveling, speaking, preaching, and doing my best to be a good husband to my wife and my three kids, that's about as much as one man or at least this man can do.

My buddies and I, we all went to law school together, and once we started working in different cities, we all did crazy stuff, and we'd write e-mails to each other about the stuff we would do. And my friends thought my e-mails were really funny and they said, "Dude, why don't you put this up on a Web site. You know people would love to read this."