Writing Quotes - Page 907

I gave up writing blurbs because you make one friend and 200 enemies.

I've been writing about James Fenimore Cooper. He was not a writer. Here was a man who was 30 years old and had never put anything more than his signature on paper.

If I didn't see its place in the Saga when I planned it, I probably wouldn't write it at all.

Everything I write is designed to be milked to the last drop of revenue.

And so with Hemingway's writing, he famously wrote to one of his publishers - he said, you don't need a high school education to enjoy my writing. And it's going to titillate the masses. I mean, anybody can relate to it, but the style is so revolutionary that it will titillate highbrow critics, which it did.

Hemingway himself and Hemingway's writing were both brilliant, brilliant cocktails.

I think I turned to writing really just to wake up in the morning and be a musician and to have something to do, and feel like a musician every day even if I wasn't working.

There are vast differences between scripts and stories, of course. Few fiction writers would want to give up the opportunity to explore how the minds of their characters work, or to set aside the opportunity to provide necessary background exposition in a succinct fashion.

Some people, it [songwriting] comes faster. Some people, it comes slower.

I don't think you can write novels on the road. You need a certain stability.

It just takes a long time for me [to write a song]. I'm very slow. And it comes, kind of, by dribbles and drops.

I have to finish it in order to know whether it deserves to survive.

I always thought that poetry is the verdict that others give to a certain kind of writing. So to call yourself a poet is a kind of dangerous description. It's for others; it's for others to use.

Any writer who believes in the 'lucky creative accident' in writing is pushing elephants on roller skates up greased ramps.

Writing is done by someone. It is not, like some mythical goddess, a skill that springs forth, full grown from the genes of inspiration.

So writing is a very, very difficult position to obtain... and retain.

You usually dont know what you are going to write about so you go to the places and talk to the people who were identified with the events.

I essentially write for myself.

The first thing you have to do is get immersed in the project, organizing yourself, knowing what you are going after and not going after. It is extremely important to know what you don't want to find. Research to me is as important or more important than the writing. It is the foundation upon which the book is built.

Who here wants to be a writer?' I asked. Everyone in the room raised his hand. 'Why the hell aren't you home writing?' I said, and left the stage.

The biographer who writes the life of his subjects self-concept passes through a fade into the inner house of life.

Henry James joyously engaged in the act of writing. A good day's writing gave him a sense of strength, of control over chaos, a victory of order and clarity over the confused battle of existence.

Sometimes I start with lyrics - rarely - but sometimes I might have an idea for some lyrics that I wanna say. I write them down and figure out how to use that in a melody to write a song.

If you asked someone, 'Can you play the violin?' and he says, 'I don't know, I have not tried, perhaps I can,' you laugh at him. Whereas about writing, people always say: 'I don't know, I have not tried,' as though one had only to try and one would become a writer.

When I was speaking about communicating, I meant that the listener - we have to reach the listener; otherwise, of course, you're writing the piece, as I say, only for the satisfaction of seeing it on the paper for yourself, and then it ends right there.