Writing Quotes - Page 744

Too many people write books because they want to be a New York Times best-seller. They want the glory and the fame.

Too many people write books as a calling card.

Academic experts may not be good at doing what they are experts in themselves, but they are good at explaining the subject matter to others. They write books, teach courses and offer lessons and give steps others can follow.

I couldn't understand why my productivity went down when I had deliberately made more time available to write. Then I realized it was because I wasn't flying as much.

Following takes why. Transactions take what. It has to be real. It has to be the same for writing a book.

You have to write a book because you believe it has helped you, because you believe it has helped others personally and you are dying to share with it others because you know it will add value to their lives. You write it for them like a gift. You don't want anything from them. You don't want them to do anything for you. You don't even care if they all share the book with their friends, they don't all have to buy them. You're just dying to share this idea with people. Your challenge is to write it in a way that is compelling, enjoyable to read so that they will get the idea.

A movie is a creative process from its conception, through its writing, to its execution, to the editing. I think with the best films there is some kind of contribution from one person all the way through that. The best films are made by people who write, direct, and edit, so there's continuity.

The nuts and bolts of shooting a film and writing a film are still really difficult. But what makes it easier is the fact that you know you're going to go to work with your best mate.

When I was collecting material for a political gossip column, and someone said something interesting, I would wait for them to add, "and I don't want to read that in your magazine!" In which case I wouldn't use it. But if they didn't remember to say it, I'd nip off to the loo, write the story up, come back and change the subject.

It's not really about confidence. It's just something that isn't really in the vocabulary of what goes on at work. The writers write and the actors act.

The thing about humour is that the super-ego is also at play, so what interested me, particularly in the last chapter which is key to the book -and no one seems to have picked this up in writings on Freud - is that, in the later Freud, the essence of humour is the ability to look at myself and find myself ridiculous. That makes me laugh.

The more stringent the rules and the more limiting they are, the more the poet and writer is forced to resort to special techniques and intricacies to escape them. And these techniques and intricacies adorn the writing and make it more beautiful. But, in the modern world, linguistic intricacies and embellishments do not attract much attention anymore, and the more sincere and intimate the relationship between a work and its reader, the better.

Politics becomes a part of a writer's working life. The writer's protagonists are born in the context of the feelings that this atmosphere evokes. How can writers separate themselves from these feelings and create protagonists that come from Mars? Even writers who only write about psychological or internal issues or about love are writing under their prevailing atmosphere, and their writings will take on the hue of the time, place, and mood of their environment.

Neither in my private life nor in my writings, have I ever made a secret of being an out-and-out unbeliever.

A piece of creative writing, like a day-dream, is a continuation of, and a substitute for, what was once the play of childhood.

Munch writes poetry with color. He has taught himself to see the full potential of color in art His use of color is above all lyrical. He feels color and he reveals his feelings through colors; he does not see them in isolation. He does not just see yellow, red and blue and violet; he sees sorrow and screaming and melancholy and decay.

What happened was I was a songwriter on Quincy Jones' publishing company, Qwest, for two and a half years before I gave him the song for Michael Jackson. He had a meeting with the songwriters. I think there were about six of us on the West Coast and we all had a meeting at his house where he sort of gave us an outline of what he wanted. To finish this BAD album Jones needed one more song to round out the album. I took notes and then I then took my notes to my writing partner Glen Ballard.

When you write a movie, you have a hundred collaborators. But when you write a novel, it's yours.

I'm going to quit writing.

There's a phrase in Shakespeare: he refers to it as the 'hidden imposthume', and this idea of a hidden swelling is seminal to cancer. But even in more contemporary writing it's called 'the big C'.

I am a scientist and I am a physician. So I write papers.

Sandeep Jauhar’s Doctored is a passionate and necessary book that asks difficult questions about the future of medicine. The narrative is gripping, and the writing is marvelous. But it was the gravity of the problem—so movingly told—that grabbed and kept my attention throughout this remarkable work.

Writing anything as an expert is really poisonous to the writing process, because you lose the quality of discovery.

The way I would live my life is: never do something in real life that I would not want to write about in my Autobiography.

I don't love performing, because it's nerve-racking and it's time - consuming to rehearse a whole set - and my time can often be better served writing music and just making it and putting it out.