Writing Quotes - Page 817

You do not write your life with words...You write it with actions. What you think is not important. It is only important what you do.

We absolutely need to reform the Congressional budget-writing process.

I lead a normal life and I don't assume there is anything I can impart to people. The only reason to write a book would be to make money, and I don't want to do that. To write a book would be going against how I've lived.

I really don't have an ear for pitch. I can't sing at all, I can't hum melodies and I can't write riffs.

I'm trying to write a TV show. Ideally it would be just a reality-TV show, getting the guy who played Eddie Winslow and Kirk Cameron to live in a house. The Jehovah's Witnesses would come to the house a lot or something like that. I kind of like the idea of Scientologists and Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses trying to convert Kirk Cameron.

There is and always has been for me a peculiar need to write. This is very different from wanting to be a writer. To be a writer always seemed something so far removed from my talents and abilities and imaginings that it didn't afflict me at all as a notion when I was young. But I was always conscious that I wanted to write.

Whenever there's something wrong with your writing, suspect that there's something wrong with your thinking.

We have to tell the American public that they're missing the boat, that they have to get into writing and reading. Not only that, but books won't crash in the year 2000.

Do you all have a living room floor or a bedroom floor? Then you can write a book.

I'm still writing in my old age. And still loving it. It fills my days. Writing is my salvation. I just get up in the morning, and I'm in this world that I scratch out and begin again and write over - and then suddenly it's lunchtime, and I'm back.

Outside of family, writing is essential. To me, it's like breathing.

I have no special talent, you know. I never took a writing course before I began to write.

Everything in my life affects my writing. There are no separate parts of my life.

Revision is the heart of writing. Every page I do is done over seven or eight times.

The only thing I remember writing in prison is a couple of poems for an inmate magazine they did once a year.

People think I'm educated because I talk and write well, but the fact is I never finished high school. I've read a lot, is all.

It's very hard to find good and wholesome, edifying and challenging writing for the students to perform. In my classroom I strive to do that as best as I can.

There are many important books on oral history. My book was the launch title in the Understanding Qualitative Research series with Oxford University Press. I think what makes my book and all of the series books unique is the emphasis on writing instruction for researchers who want to use the method being described.

Students are often taught when to use a particular method and how to use it, but not how to effectively write up their research plan and then later their research results.

Writing about why you write is a funny business, like scratching what doesn't itch. Impulses are mysterious, and explaining them must be done with mirrors, like certain cunning slight-of-hand routines.

In description we hear and feel the absorption of the author in the material. We sense the presence of the creator of the scene. .. This personal absorption is what we mean by 'style.' It is strange that we would choose so oddly surfacey a word - style - for this most soulful aspect of writing. We could, perhaps more exactly, call this relation between consciousness and its subject 'integrity.' What else is the articulation of perception?

Refuse to write your life and you have no life.

You write your first novel with the desperation of the damned. You're afraid that you'll never write anything else, ever again.

But when I was a little kid, I was always writing stories and illustrating little books that I would create.

I hate the term "mystery". That's not what I write. I think the Scarpetta novels are much more character-driven than an average puzzle solver. Writing should be like a pane of glass - there's another world on the other side and your vision carries you there, but you're not aware of having passed through a barrier to get there.