Writing Quotes - Page 866

When I started writing, there was nothing about zombies. It was all teen movies, which to me are scarier than zombies, but that's another story.

By its very looseness, by its way of evoking rather than defining, suggesting rather than saying, English is a magnificent vehicle for emotional poetry.

Every kind of writing is hypocritical.

Someone from the Internet Writing Workshop sent me a link to the Gender Genie, where you paste in a section of text and it uses an algorithm to detect whether the author is male or female. Or, if you're an author, you can tell whether you're really nailing your opposite-sex characters. I mean, nailing their dialog.

I began to ration my writing, for fear I would dream through life as my father had done. I was afraid I had inherited a poisoned gene from him, a vocation without a gift.

I believed that if I was to call myself a writer, I should live on writing. If I could not live on it, even simply, I should destroy every scrap, every trace, every notebook and live some other way.

A writer's life stands in relation to his work as a house does to a garden, related but distinct.

I write every day as a matter of course It is not a burden. It is the way I live.

The fan mail I get from kids are asking me questions which they do not ask their mothers and fathers. Because if they had, why write to me, a perfect stranger?

I thought that if I were going into old age I would want to do what [Giuseppe] Verdi did, which is to write extraordinary things, and to really find myself.

I don't know how to write a children's book.

I never set out to write books for children. I don't have a feeling that I'm gonna save children or my life is devoted.

I write in the most distressingly slow way in terms of punctuation and grammar.

The Journal is not essentially a confession, a story about oneself. It is a Memorial. What does the writer have to remember? Himself, who he is when he is not writing, when he is living his daily life, when he is alive and real, and not dying and without truth.

When I worked in theater, I was always writing things on Post-it Notes and sticking them on screens or desks. Twitter has given me a way of continuing to post those notes, only a lot of other people see them, too.

Being an author means, almost by definition, that you make up characters and then complicate their lives. That's it, really. You make up characters and give them problem after problem after problem.

It was unavoidable, my writing. I feel I had no choice in the matter, no more than I had about an unfortunate bone structure and a healthy head of hair.

Whatever (its) virtues, (the) writing explores the culture of work but marginalizes work itself.

I would like to try to write poetry that would do everything I wanted poems to do, but also be readable by any person. I didn't know if this was possible, but I suddenly knew, in that few-times-in-a-lifetime sort of way, that this would be my life's search.

I think it is our job as poets to refuse the terms that society so often sets for usefulness. That, for instance, is what Dickinson did: she refused to be a wife, a homemaker, a standard member of her community. She knew she had to in order to have the space and time to write her poems. Thank god she said no!

The question does arise if how and why to write poetry in this time. It feels both completely essential and also quite difficult. But that's how writing poetry has felt to me my whole life. Everything seems to have just gotten immensely more mortal and tragic and scary, which makes it hard to concentrate, but also, if harnessed, can provide immense energy for making poems.

I wanted to write not exclusively for (or against) poets or scholars, though many of them are people, too! But that was not my primary audience. It was that person you like who tells you they don't get poetry, and you think to yourself, aw man, what can I do for this good person?

Today is such a strange day. The news is out about the Russians and mini-Donald. This seems like a turning point, but it certainly has felt that way before. Like all of us, I am vibrating with electric uncertainty. How do you manage to concentrate and write poems? I know that for me it is just a relief to be in that sort of thinking, away from the news and all the immense global and personal worries.

There is all this stuff about how sensitive poets are and how in touch with feelings, etc. they are, but really all we care about is language. At least in the initial stages of the process of writing the poem, though later other things start to come in, and a really good poem usually needs something more than just an interest in the material of language to mean anything to a reader.

For me, form is something I locate in the process of writing the poems. What I mean is, I start scribbling, and then try to form the poem - on a typewriter or on my computer - and, by trial and error, try to find the right shape. I just try to keep forming the poem in different ways until it feels right to me.