Writing Quotes - Page 729

Don't try to follow any trends, just concentrate on writing great songs and knowing your instrument. All the other stuff will fall into place.

I just co-created a story for a Disney movie that I'm working on with my fiancée. And also about to finish up writing a T.V. pilot set in New Orleans that I'm really excited about. So I'm definitely trying to stay as busy as possible, for sure.

It's a lot easier to think of an app and write it than it is to convince people to want it.

The living together is very important in a way. It's important for writing. It wouldn't be important if we were like just getting other people's numbers together, we'd just have to meet at rehearsals, but writing is something almost completely different.

The music I write, I feel, is not the kind of music for a 25-year-old.

I actually went into writing first to supplement my income, which was a strange thing to do and actually failed.

I've never had a mentor personally of any kind. It feels like, generally, in the writing world or the art world, it's more of a thing in America, because you have writing programs, which we don't have. You have these amazing writers who are teachers. I never did a writing program so I never met a writer until I was published. I guess I can't really explain my compulsion for writing these kind of mentor characters.

I have that sort of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David/George Costanza thing where people are like, "How did you feel writing such an unlikable character?" And I'm like, "It's me! I based him on myself!" There are certain moments where they do feel like unwittingly personal attacks.

On the one hand I'm writing about somebody about whom I say in the book, "The only thing worse than being a statistic is being a statistical anomaly." So I'm writing about a particularly unlucky person. So that's a special type of hell, to be particularly unlucky.

Once a year I try writing a poem, usually because I've read some poetry that amazed me and I want to do that.

I never thought that it would take me so long to do something. I thought everything was temporary and sometimes the best thing you have working in your favor is a bad sense of time. In order to sit down and write a book that takes six years you have to have a screwed up sense of time because that's too daunting. No one is going to pick up a pen and a piece of paper and say, "Okay, six years, here we go."

I was in the hospital and I was paralyzed and I went through all of these things. I've had all of these crazy experiences and jobs in my life, but I never really write about them because I've already told them as stories to friends. For me, the process of writing is the process of invention. But the hospital story felt told already. There was nothing to discover in the telling of it. The discovery had to be in the form. It wasn't really the unfamiliarity of the form, it was more about a way incorporate invention and how to realize it imaginatively.

My writing goal is just this desperation to get as much done as possible. It's never a comfortable, relaxed thing. Especially because I know so much of the story that I want to tell and I feel so far away from the end. Actually feels a hundred years away, and every hour I'm not working is another hour away from finishing.

I write fiction, there's no guarantee that what I say is truthful.

The universe doesn't really care if you bounce back. It doesn't feel that weird to write about paralysis or being in hospital or losing a child or, you know, splitting up with your wife, because that's just life.

So I made an outline. Well, you know, days are going by, and I am not writing anything because this thing is laid out in front of me. It's as if you get every brochure for a trip you are going to go on and you get the minutest details of every step along the way. Well, I really doubt you're going to then get in the car and go. You know, it's like, why bother if it's all laid out in front of you?

I read Write More, Sell More a few years ago and loved it.

You can be writing every day. When you go on a road trip, the trip itself becomes part of the story.

I actually credit Twitter with fine-tuning some joke-writing skills. I still feel like I'm working at it.

I've been writing for a long time, since the late '60s. But it hasn't been in the same form. I used to write scripts for television. I wrote for my comedy act. Then I wrote screenplays, and then I started writing New Yorker essays, and then I started writing plays. I didn't start writing prose, really, until the New Yorker essays, but they were comic. I didn't start writing prose, really, until the '90s. In my head, there was a link between everything. One thing led to another.

In a strange way, I don't have a job, so I have a lot of time on my hands. When I do work, it might be very concentrated, and it might be months where you're not really doing anything except maybe playing the banjo or writing something. You know, there's a lot of time in the day if you're not working 9 to 5.

Deeply funny musings and adventures elevate Paul Rudnick to the highest level of American comedy writing.

Writing is something I took up rather than anything I had an inclination toward. I like acting -delivering someone else's message - but writing is more of an accomplishment.

No matter how many times people say it - 'Oh, I'm just writing this for myself' 'Oh, I'm just doing this for myself' - nobody's doing it for themselves! You're doing it for an audience. So whether I'm performing or writing a book or playing music, it's definitely to be put out there and to be received in some way, definitely.

I hope people find my movies funny and will watch them years from now. And, in terms of writing, I hope that something remains that will not seem old-fashioned, that will still have a ­vibrancy to it 50 years from now.