Writing Quotes - Page 943

Writing stories is the habit of lying put to good use.

Writing is my obsession, my passion. My relationship with it is one of the most complex and agonizing and richly vexing that I have in my life.

I write across genres so I see them, more often, as complementary instead of separated by boundaries.

If I'd learned nothing else, it was this: If you want to be a great writer, be a man. If you can't be a man, write like one.

The lessons learned in journalism also apply. Writing for NPR has taught me to cut a piece in half and then in half again - without losing the essence. Apply that to the swollen prose of a bulky novel and you might reveal a beautiful work.

My whole life was writing, recording and touring over and over again. At some point I realised I wasn't enjoying myself any more.

Writing helps me process things that are happening to me.

Songwriting is like editing. You write down all this stuff - all this bad, stupid stuff - and then you have to get rid of everything except the very best.

My guitar playing has not developed as much as I think it could because I never practice. I only play when I'm writing or recording or when I'm playing on tour. When I'm sitting around at home, I never play.

When I start writing, I'll have a vague concept or I'll just have a title, and the song just goes on its own direction. Usually it goes in many directions within each song. They get really convoluted sometimes.

When I first started making music, I didn't really know what I was doing. I just wanted to write songs. I didn't have a concept. I didn't think it through. I was just flailing around doing what comes naturally. It took me a really long time to step back and deal with what I was doing with any kind of perspective or self-awareness.

By speech first, but far more by writing, man has been able to put something of himself beyond death. In tradition and in books an integral part of the individual persists, for it can influence the minds and actions of other people in different places and at different times: a row of black marks on a page can move a man to tears, though the bones of him that wrote it are long ago crumbled to dust.

The people who make history are not the people who make it who are there but the people who make it and then write about it.

I thought a dignified thing to do would be to live in the country by the time I'm 50 and write books

I'm one of those writers who started off writing novels and came to writing short stories later, partly because I didn't have the right ideas, partly because I think that short stories are more difficult. I think learning to write short stories also made me attracted toward a paring down of the novel form.

Irony ... may be defined as what people miss.

Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why can't we leave well enough alone? Why aren't the books enough?

I'm a novelist, so I can't write about ideas unless they're attached to people.

The imagination doesn't crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever's there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is always a slatted wooden tray in some cool, dark attic, which the writer nervously visits from time to time; and yes, oh dear, while he's been hard at work downstairs, up in the attic there are puckering skins, warning spots, a sudden brown collapse and the sprouting of snowflakes. What can he do about it?

Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.

I was initially planning to write about grief in terms of Eurydice and the myth thereof. By that point the overall metaphor of height and depth and flat and falling and rising was coming into being in my mind.

I just think that the skepticism about truth has almost completely flipped - from being something associated with generally left-leaning progressives to being something which is a tool of right-wing populists and demagogues. I think a lot of those people writing books ten years ago would now think those books are no longer needed, they've kind of been vindicated.

I'm not one of these people who is sour about academia. I'm very lucky not to be in academia, but I am an absolute parasite. While I was writing my book on comparative philosophy I was drawing on some fantastic scholars - university based people. The academy is absolutely necessary, but there should also be a role for those bringing it together. It's such a frustration sometimes.

When I'm writing a song, things are always popping into my head, it's not so direct. It feels more like I'm in a room and there's this whole big jumble of clothes on the floor and it's like choosing what to wear. There are a lot of different things in there and you kind of pull something out and think, "No, that's not right," or you're like, "Yes I'll put this on with this."

I really like Shakespeare a lot. The characters that he writes for females, I think, are really great and a lot more compelling than what modern writers write, which is weird because they didn't have actresses then.