Writing Quotes - Page 770

To say that I have an undisciplined mind would not be incorrect overall, but it's a little off the mark because I have great discipline when I write - but only for about ten minutes.

In order to be able to write a good joke, you have to find the truth.

Pace is crucial. Fine writing isn't enough. Writing students can be great at producing a single page of well-crafted prose; what they sometimes lack is the ability to take the reader on a journey, with all the changes of terrain, speed and mood that a long journey involves. Again, I find that looking at films can help. Most novels will want to move close, linger, move back, move on, in pretty cinematic ways.

A novel usually takes me two years. A year to research and plan and dream. Then a year to write.

I'm not really one of those people who goes and writes some big back story and agonizes over characters. I think you kind of can get it. For me personally, it's just kind of more instinctive. But I don't have kind of an acting background. I fell into it accidentally.

I can think of few things more disastrous than starting a new correspondence with any one. Letters are a burden indeed ... they seem often the last straw that breaks the back ... you should see the piles of those that I must answer that litter and weight my writing table.

Words, living and ghostly, the quick and the dead, crowd and jostle the otherwise too empty corridors of my mind ... To move among this bright, strange, often fabulous herd of beings, to summon them at my will, to fasten them on to paper like flies, that they may decorate it, this is the pleasure of writing.

The writing is so great on TV now; it's such a pleasure to watch.

I found it was really impossible for me to write songs when I couldn't sing.

As I started writing about loss and grief, I was taking what felt unmanageable and using my songwriting, my sense of poetry and discipline, to try and make it manageable.

I'm a songwriter. My voice just serves what I'm writing about. So to let all that go, I mean, bring the sensibilities of it actually to the song choices, but to just be the interpreter was incredibly liberating and really fun.

For me, fiction belongs to my inner being, is something essential which defines me - I am a fiction writer in the same way I am a woman, the same way I am dark-haired - it is something essential and structural. It's like an exogenous skeleton that keeps me going. And I don't know how I would manage to live without writing, working with words.

The truth about being a writer is you do not choose the stories you tell, but stories choose you. You do not choose, therefore, characters either. Novels are like dreams you dream with your eyes open; they are books which appear in your head with the same apparent immediateness as they appear in your dreams at night. A writer always writes their obsessions and the truth is that all throughout life we end up writing the same thing in different ways.

I'm much more used to the TV shows, which are demanding to write and perform but very fulfilling.

Reading and writing music is a wonderful way of getting ideas in your head down to someone else who reads and writes, but if you don't read and write, and the other musician you're playing with are trying to express something who doesn't read and write, than it's a question of "I wrote" so that you must learn from listening and from understanding where that's coming from.

The creative part, with the writing of it and the vision, and finding the voice of a show and the characters, is much harder to teach somebody. It's like music. You can either play it or you can't. If you can't play music and you really struggle and work hard, you can learn, but you have to have some inner gift to take it to the next level.

Writing is like that. You have to have some basic creative spark, and then, if you have that, I feel like you can learn the production side of it. You can learn how to be a good producer. And I guess it does take a certain balance of those two skills in your head to be a successful showrunner.

I'm always tempted in the back of my mind to continue to write things in the Star Trek universe, in the novels or the comics, just because I don't get to play in that universe and I don't get to hang out with those characters any more. You spend hours upon hours of your life, day after day sitting in writers' rooms, talking about these people and these situations, and it becomes very real to you. They're friends of yours, in a lot of ways.

The President [Barack Obama] is very focused on [healthcare]. He, of course, is also writing this speech at high speed. And right coming up until the speech, he is convinced that a full plan, letter and verse of what the administration wants, will be released.

I love learning about different dialects and I own all sorts of regional and time-period slang dictionaries. I often browse through relevant ones while writing a story. I also read a lot of diaries and oral histories.

Faulkner came from my region and taught me how you could write about a place.

Like Flannery O'Connor, McCorkle's genius is to give us both philosophical speculation and a riveting narrative filled with unforgettable characters. Great writing, poignancy, humor, wisdom-all are in abundance here. Jill McCorkle is one of the South's greatest writers; she is also one of America's.

I think that's what I love about writing, is the ability to try to, in a sense, take a vacation from yourself and try to enter the sensibility of another time, another character, another place.

I write for myself; I release the albums to connect with everyone else.

It is not democracy to send in billions of dollars to push regime change overseas. It isn't democracy to send in the NGOs to re-write laws and the constitution in places like Ukraine. It is none of our business.