Writing Quotes - Page 784

By ignoring a lot of American culture you can write more interesting stories. Unfortunately, if you were writing about America as it is, you'd be writing about a lot of people sitting in front of television sets.

I realized very early that I was never going to make by living by writing string quartets. But I wanted to write music and I didn't want to have to do anything else.

I wanted to write music, and cook, and play cards, and have a nice time.

The loneliness of writing is that you baffle your friends and change the lives of strangers.

In 25 years of writing novels, I've never had anything that felt like writer's block.

My dream has always been to suspend myself in space when I write, and lying horizontal in bed is the closest to doing that.

The thing that makes reading and writing suspect in the eyes of the market economy is that it's not corrupted.

Novel-writing is the only place where someone who would have liked to do anything can still do that vicariously.

When I'm not writing music, I'm playing guitar, or reading philosophy. So all I have left is just an hour or two for Claudia Schiffer.

I find myself seeking out the commonalities of our different religious experiences with hopes of encouraging, through my writings, the most hopeful, loving and redemptive qualities in all of us.

I suppose I have an active imagination, and writing allows me to live it out.

Don't try to write what other people are writing - write what is true to you.

The business of writing is empathising with situations that aren't your own.

Writing is akin to method acting. Before the writer can render a fully convincing world, he or she must inhabit that world, and every major character who lives there. I'm not suggesting that one always has to go this far. But I truly believe what makes the setting for my novels come alive is that I've lived there first.

An education that does not teach clear, coherent writing cannot provide our world with thoughtful adults; it gives us instead, at the best, clever children of all ages.

One of the things about me is that I actually had marginally middle-class living from writing. For years and years, I actually wrote so much through the '70s and '80s that I made a living. And very rarely have I had to take another job. And now it's impossible for anybody coming up to make such a living. They've pissed in the temple, you know?

No matter what, I'm never going to get an anthology from an actual publisher, though I could always score another music anthology. But if this is going to be a document of a multiplicity of my writings, it'll do. It feels like a birthday party or something.

I didn't mind writing incoherently, up until about 1980, occasionally. But after that, I decided, might as well be articulate. And I found, though, that writing poetry affected my prose to the point where I never again wrote in one draft, and my prose just took longer and longer and longer. It took longer and longer to come up with an acceptable text. And that's probably one of the reasons that my output has slowed down.

I mean, what's thematic? How to put it? Going back to, like, 1980, when I started writing poetry. Language itself became an issue. I'd even think about font as an aspect of text, you know, how something looks on a page. A lot of this is the product of a very solitary existence, it's like, language, I mean, you know. A lot of time spent alone in the creation of all of this stuff.

A lot of things appearing under my byline were written in one draft. But when I started to write poetry, I started getting fussy about every syllable. I wouldn't allow the work to be seen unless it felt perfect. Not clunky at all, no clunky syllables. So, really, for the printed page, it had to have a feeling of rhythmic and syntactic verisimilitude or something.

It never occurred to me that there was anything odd about writing my own music, and so I used to just jot down little ditties and things like that. And it was only in later years I suppose when I was about nine or so, that I realised there was this thing called composing.

I had to write about realistic circumstances. Thats the way my brain works. And I think that gave me a sort of place in the field.

I wanted to write a book that showed how the subjectification of the "the murderer" has changed little in over a hundred years, and to argue that this "exceptional figure" serves a conservative function in modern culture that bears closer interrogation than it has commonly received.

Writing system software is like planning a family.If you make a mistake you have to live with it for 20 years.

It's a dream for all writers to write for Broadway.