Writing Quotes - Page 901

One of the best things about writing is how it redeems, not to mention recycles, all of one's prior experiences, including or perhaps especially the failures.

I don't for one second think about the possibility of censorship when I am writing a new book. I know I am a person who cares about kids and who cares about truth and I am guided by my own instincts, and trust them.

I don't set out to transmit a message. I don't write with a political point of view. There are no religious overtones. Looking back at my books, I can say, 'Oh, yes, it is there.' But it's not in my mind when I write.

If Shakespeare had lived in our age, he would have been sued for writing Romeo And Juliet, because as everybody knows, he plagiarized that from an Italian play.

Paradoxically, in fantasy for young people I was able to express my own deepest feelings and attitudes more than I had ever done in writing for adults.

I came to fantasy fairly late. For some ten years, I had been happily writing fiction and non-fiction for adults. But I always loved fantasy, whether for adults or young people; and at that particular point in my life, I wanted to try it, to understand it, as part of the process of learning to be a writer. The results were beyond anything I could have foreseen. As I've said often and elsewhere, it was the most creative and liberating experience of my life.

Books can truly change our lives: the lives of those who read them, the lives of those who write them. Readers and writers alike discover things they never knew about the world and about themselves.

After seven years of writing - and working many jobs to support my family - I finally got published.

When I write I consider it a rhyme. In the studio I consider it laying down vocals. Onstage, I'm entertaining; I don't even think about it.

All great writers are schizophrenics, you know what I'm saying? 'Cause they switch up. They become the person when they write.

That's such a wonderful thing about the mixing process is when you write the demo or the track, [and] it sort of goes through a couple of different changes and you don't really know what tracks are going to end up working out.

I had self-doubt about whether my story was interesting to people. I didn't want to write something that was anecdotal. It was important to me that people would get something out of my book. I want people to read it and say, "Now I don't feel so alone," or "I'm going to remember that next time I'm being an asshole."

Write a smart joke and people want to talk about it and keep the dialogue going. Also, if you can make someone laugh, it's a pronouncement that they like you on some level.

I was only loosely aware of [Georgia] O'Keeffe's work. Primarily, I had seen her famous paintings of skulls with flowers, which are not my favorite. I didn't really become familiar with her work until after I started writing the book, but the more I learned about her the more I admired her.

Now I am as big of an [ Georgia] O'Keeffe admirer as Ivy [Wilkes] is, but that came through writing the book.

I've spent many a day worrying that I will never be able to write again!

I started writing about New Mexico in an autobiography class I was taking for school, and realized that it was very inspiring place for me.

From beginning to end, the novel [Dissemblers] took about three and a half years to write. I didn't write it chronologically.

I tend to only write productively for one to two hours per day, so there is plenty of time left over for me to work a day job!

I find that time constraints actually make me more productive, and "real world" experiences provide a lot of inspiration to write.

At the end, I cobbled scenes all together and smoothed out the transitions as much as possible. Incidentally, I would not recommend this approach to writing a book, and will probably not write that way again!

Writing a book set in New Mexico was partially a way to express my own love for the state, and partially a way to prudently follow the advice to write what you know.

One is that I'm really interested in movies about sex and lust, because I think those are primal, carnal instincts that translate well to a visual medium. Two, these things that I write, or want to make, are an expression of - I don't want to say darker instincts, but let's say darker instincts. But that's why I'm a writer.

I'm a civilized person who obeys the law and is pretty easy to get along with, but I'm more complicated than that. I use my work as a way to get all that other stuff out and experiment with feelings and ideas, and the forbidden. That's just part of my process, I think, to identify something forbidden. That's what lures me into wanting to do the work, write the story down.

There's an obvious romance to being the drinking writer. But if I'm drinking, I'm not writing.