Writing Quotes - Page 772

Every writing teacher gives the subliminal message, every time they teach: 'Your life counts for something.' In no other subject that I know of is that message given.

When you have the goods, you don't need to dress up what you're writing.

If you put anger in the writing, then it's like an actor crying on stage. The audience will not cry with the actor and in some way inure itself against the emotion.

Some of us have the good fortune of some type of natural gift, whether it's playing tennis or painting or writing.

When I write a political column for the Chicago Sun-Times, when liberals disagree with me, they send in long, logical e-mails explaining all my errors. I hardly ever get well-reasoned articles from the right. People just tell me to shut up. That's the message: "Shut up. Don't write anymore about this. Who do you think you are?"

If the biblical writers were writing today they might spell out some things more clearly, given how easily even Christians fall into thinking in ways alien and foreign to the biblical story of God and creation.

Poets are sultans, if they had their will; For every author would his brother kill.

TV writing is tricky to navigate because you have so many different personalities - the actors, multiple producers.

He that will write well in any tongue must follow this counsel of Aristotle: to speak as the common people do, to think as wise men do.

The least learned, for the most part, have been always most ready to write.

I've been writing jokes since I'm fifteen. Not out of happiness, but to go to a different place, because reality wasn't good to me.

If you get a song right for its usage at the time, it can be useful to others. ...Those songs are more friendly to other artists looking for material.

Every now and then I'll get seduced by the idea of money, and I'll take a stab at that...and I fall flat on my ass. I've never written a lasting song with that mindset. It doesn't work.

When I was growing up, the exam system didn't allow you to write fiction, so you never did.

I tend to plan as I write. And I want to leave myself open and the character open to keep on going until it seems to be the time to stop.

I write short stories when a little idea occurs to me, that I know isn't a part of a novel that will stand by itself and should be concentrated.

Schools don't really allow failure and yet it's part of any endeavour, not just writing.

I can't do that wonderful thing that Tom Waits and Bob Dylan do - to do imagery. I'm not good at that. I just write from the heart.

I find dictating in the mass media particularly good because you're writing for voice anyway; you're writing for people to say a line and, consequently, saying a line through a machine is quite a valid test for the validity of what you're saying.

You know, writer can write about the Foreign Legion without ever having been in the Foreign Legion, but that doesn't necessarily mean that what he's written doesn't necessarily reflect the nature of him as an individual - or her. Using the male gender because it's me speaking. I don't mean to put down the female.

I write much better in the nonconfines of the early morning than I do the clutter of the day.

I don't think it's man's function to write. I don't think it's a normal thing like teeth-brushing and going to the bathroom. It's a supered position on the animal.

I've written all that I've wanted to write to date.

It's part of the business of really not caring about topping myself because I really don't care what's going to happen. I think just surviving is a major thing. I'd like to write something that my peers, my colleagues, my fellow writers would find a source of respect.

I ask for your indulgence when I march out quotations. This is the double syndrome of men who write for a living and men who are over forty. The young smoke pot - we inhale from our 'Bartlett's.'