Writing Quotes - Page 946

Writing anything is terribly hard but, alas for me, because I am addicted, a heck of a lot of fun. I often am sorry I ever started writing prose, because it is so hard. But I can't stop.

I don't think you get to good writing unless you expose yourself and your feelings.

I kept a diary as a teenager but I never would have shared it with anyone. Still, I think it's very good practice to write things down.

I have like two dreams a week that I have to write a paper that I'm late with or that I've gone back to high school and have to do that in addition to my current job.

I always had stories inside my head and one day I just decided to start writing them down. I didn't actually decide.

I like to read fiction best and I like to write fiction, too.

I love to talk with children. I try to visit schools but it's hard for me to travel when I'm trying to write. Some authors are able to do both.

I don't really know exactly how it happened but I don't like the idea that I would ever have said I'm going to write about racism or puberty or bullying.

It didn't happen in the 70s. So I had a whole decade when I was writing these books and maybe there was a little bit here or there but there was no big effort to ban books.

I try to create new characters in each book I write. That's what makes writing fun and interesting for me.

The American middle class, it seems to me, is looking to politicians now to satisfy a pretty basic - and urgent - level of need. Yet people in the upper middle class - with their excellent health benefits, schools, salaries, retirement plans, nannies and private afterschool programs - have journeyed so far from that level of need that, it often seems to me, they literally cannot hear what resonates with the middle class. That creates a problematic blind spot for those who write, edit or produce what comes to be known about our politicians and their policies.

As for the multiple editions, in the case of a truly great writer - Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Proust, someone with a canon - there is often a "variorum" edition of the work that presents its variants. I think publishing most other writing that way would be impossible, economically, for publishers, and very ill-advised for authors.

I write poetry in order to live more fully.

My first book took five years to write and I made $1,000 on it. The second took three years and I made $3,000. All this time I was a housewife being supported by a husband. I was very lucky.

It doesn't matter whether the bride or the bridegroom writes the letters of thanks for wedding presents provided that these go out immediately after the arrival of each present and are not in the handwriting of the bride's mother.

The truly essential bargain between host and guest requires the guest only to respond promptly, show up on time, socialize with other guests, thank the host, write additional thanks and reciprocate. You needn't bring anything.

Why bring children into a world where no one writes letters?

Toni Morrison is challenged regularly because she is a black author who writes about the real world. She speaks with so much knowledge about black issues she can't be accused of creating these (issues). People find these issues threatening.

Surely the whole point of writing your own life story is to be as honest as you possibly can, revealing everything about yourself that is most private and probably most interesting for that very reason.

I can write for a long time on one novel and not get tired.

If you look at some of the language in the basic writings of Hamas, there is that famous call to push the Israelis into the sea. Now, I would say that most Palestinian politicians on the ground say, of course that's not what we want, and even within Hamas there is some published debate about that claim, but until the claim is removed, it's still noxious.

If you want help in starting to write memoirs, you don't want to fall into the clutches of a famous writer who has been hired to teach at a writing workshop solely because of his name's ability to attract students, rather than because of any teaching skill. You should not have to grapple with someone who secretly thinks you should be writing about his life rather than your own.

[Tom] Wolfe's books offered a whole new world to step into, and whilst at times you could accuse him of being somewhat long-winded, he had an incredible quality of prose and a bravery of writing from the heart. He believed in being autobiographical at all times.

I've always appreciated people like Graham Parker or Loudon Wainwright III, who spend their entire lives writing songs and working their asses off just to have complete artistic freedom. They're just sharing their lives with you through their music. That's the same kind of work that I'm trying to do, in my own weird way.

I wrote on the Grammys, and a few times for Garry Shandling when he was hosting. I couldn't have enjoyed those gigs more, because I would get to collaborate and try to make people I looked up to laugh, but for the most part, when you're as talented as they are, what they really want is someone who can type fast and whose presence makes them feel in the mood to write and spew and be creative, and I was a good person to have in the room.