Writing Quotes - Page 776

Well see, I'm a good enough writer that not everybody in my books talks exactly like I do.

When you write comic books and when you are writing for television, you're not writing the end product, you are writing notes for someone else to make the end product essentially. My scripts are just directions for the artist to draw pages and the pages are what is seen. I kind of feel like it's a safety net, you're able to hide behind the art to a certain extent, and in television you're able to hide behind the actors and the production, but with novels, your words are it

I write the way I write.

And I was troubled by the heavy-handed prose of so much psychoanalytic writing, which seemed drowned in its own concepts.

Writing is a spiritual path. It helps you listen to your heart, trust your inner guidance, and live your life full-out.

When words we want, love teacheth to indite; And what we blush to speak, she bids us write.

Sometimes you have to be less ashamed about writing a bad poem than you would be about being silent.

Fiction writers have their own world, and poets have their own world, and literary criticism has sort of passed over into cultural studies in the university, and so on. They seem more disconnected from each other than they did when I first began to write.

I think that were I in the middle of an obsession to write about, say, sudden oak death in California or my grandchildren or time and memory and how they look when you get to be in your sixties, and I thought, "Well, yes but people are dying every day in Baghdad," I wouldn't feel guilty about not writing about Baghdad if I didn't have any good ideas about how to write about it.

The professionalization of poetry, or the balkanization, has come out of the fact that when you apply to most creative writing programs, you have to choose your genre.

When I applied to Stanford, I applied for graduate work in the PhD program, not to the creative writing program, mostly because though I had some vague ambition of becoming a writer and I was trying to write poems and essays and stories, I didn't feel like I was far enough along to submit work to some place and have it judged.

As I started reading about it, I saw that at the beginning of the 19th century, outside of New England - which was an unusually literate place - practically no one could read or write. And even in New England, the overall rate was only about 60 percent. That still means four out of 10 people couldn't put their name to a will.

One way to escape the universe in which everything is a kind of media cartoon is to write about the part of your life that doesn't feel like a cartoon, and how the cartoon comes into it.

Pound described poetry as original research in language, and just as formal experiment in poetry has to try things and has to go too far, so does experiment with writing about politics in poetry and what the politics of poetry is.

Another problem about writing about politics in the "age of globalization" is that so much of the violence in the form of war and also in the forms of institutional violence - sweatshops, child labor, victimization of people economically - happens elsewhere and out of sight. And when we do know about it and need to witness it, it's always mediated by images of one kind or another, so you're kind of stuck trying to write about what it's like trying to be you living your life thinking about and experiencing this stuff in that way.

A book unwritten is a delightful universe of infinite possibilities. Set down one word, however, and it immediately becomes earthbound. Set down one sentence and it’s halfway to being just like every other bloody book that’s ever been written.

I've always just wanted to earn my living by writing. The best thing is to go into my study in the morning and stay there and put words together.

It's when you've stopped writing and are doing other things, especially when you're asleep, that the real work is done.

Don't try to write too much in a single session. One thousand words a day is quite enough. Stop after about four or five hours.

I was a political journalist; I came to writing novels through an interest in politics and power.

I write as well as I can. I'm a journalist at heart, so it's the story that matters.

It is perfectly legitimate to write novels which are essentially prose poems, but in the end, I think, a novel is like a car, and if you buy a car and grow flowers in it, you're forgetting that the car is designed to take you somewhere else.

I firmly believe in and support everyone's right to freedom of artistic expression. STEEL MAGNOLIAS is my artistic expression, and it is my right to say that its female characters be portrayed by women. The concept of a play set in a beauty parlor where men portray women is a terrific idea. If that is someone's artistic expression, I encourage them to write their own play as soon as possible.

God flourished my ministry and my career of creative thinking, communicating and writing back 50 years.

70 percent of what we do involves staring into space trying to figure out what the hell happens next.