Writing Quotes - Page 810

Writing ... is practically the only activity a person can do that is not competitive.

When I write about my childhood I think, oh my God, how did I ever get from there to here? Not that any great thing has happened to me. But I felt so tiny, so lost.

People talk about the pain of writing, but very few people talk about the pleasure and satisfaction.

I know there are writers who feel unhappy with domesticity and who even manufacture domestic turmoil in order to have something to write about. With me, though, the happier I feel, the better I write.

A travel book is about someone who goes somewhere, travels on the ground, sees something and spends quite a lot of time doing it, and has a hard time, and then comes back and writes about it. It's not about inventing.

Autobiographies, for the most part, to me, are like writing a love letter to yourself.

I don't really know why an idea comes to me. But all of a sudden, an idea comes and from experience I can intuit what something means when an interesting line pops up. Or I can intuit what an interesting choice might be. And I can try a couple of different choices, and see which one feels right, and then continue the song to see where it goes.

I really don't know what exactly all the songs mean. Sometimes other people have meanings and when I hear them I think, 'That's really a better meaning than I thought, and perfectly valid, given the words that exist.' So part of what makes a song really good is that people take in different meanings, and they apply them, and they might be more powerful than the ones I'm thinking.

Most of the time, when I had hits as a soloist - maybe not so much with Simon & Garfunkel - I was surprised they were hits. I didn't know what the hits were. I never thought that 'Loves Me Like A Rock' was going to be a hit, or 'Mother And Child Reunion,' or '50 Ways To Leave Your Lover.' They didn't sound like what the hits sounded like at the time. Radio was more open to things that weren't exactly what every other hit was.

As soon as your mind knows that it's on and it's supposed to produce some lines, either it doesn't or it produces things that are very predictable. And that's why I say I'm not interested in writing something that I thought about. I'm interested in discovering where my mind wants to go, or what object it wants to pick up.

I don't really like to write at a desk. I like to write when driving in a car. ... Once you're working on it, you're working on it all the time, and sometimes stuff'll come in the middle of the night, in a dream or something. Your mind is working on it all the time.

I sort of recognize it, as opposed to shaping it. Oh, that's a good idea, that's a good line. I wonder where I can use that. And when you get into a rhyme group like 'not,' you got a lot of rhymes, you got a lot of choices. The more you do it, the luckier you get.

Philip Larkin didn't write for several years before his life ended. And when he was asked why he didn't write, he said the muse deserted him. And when I read that, it really had a profound effect upon me, sort of scared me. So that's why I think I have no right to assume that some thought is going to come... But I think, in my imagination, if it is it, there will probably be something else I'm interested in.

I'm always going forward toward something, and that something is usually an album, because I like to record. I probably like to record more than I like to write.

My background is in improv and writing.

Let those who will write the nation's laws, if I can write its textbooks.

[Writing] is harder than you think. You'll be rejected often. If you do it for money, you'll quit. Love it or don't do it.

I always work from outline and almost always write out of sequence. It just works for me.

My goal is to write stories that are connected, but not sequels in any meaningful sense. Like Howard's Conan tales or Leiber's Fahrrd & the Great Mauser stories.

I`ve said this when I pass the trade promotion authority law, which allows us to get trade agreements. If we write the rules of the global economy, we will succeed in the 21st century. But we have to write those rules, we have to engage, and I think the president [Donald Trump] said Trans-Pacific Partnership is not the way to do it.

We offer a better way for dealing with persistent poverty in this country. A way that shows poor Americans the world beyond liberal ware housing and check-writing into the life everyone can find with opportunity and independence. The happiness of using your gifts and the dignity of having a job. And you know what? None of this will happen under Hillary Clinton. Only with Donald Trump and Mike Pence do we have a chance at a better way.

No, I’m not one (of those) people who votes for something then writes to the government to ask them to send us money. I did not request any stimulus money.

If I heard there was a new show, and the creators were writing about how they met, I would be like, "Pass!"

Over the years, there certainly have been plenty of ideas that I've had and given up on, but for this one, the only thing that was standing in its way was me doing it - I just had to write it... And then if it didn't happen, it didn't happen. But I didn't want it to be for lack of effort on my part, so I had hunch that it would be a good story and that we would work well together. And it certainly worked out that way.

I'm not smart enough to write about something that didn't actually happen to me. But I couldn't write a space movie if you put a gun to my head.