Writing Quotes - Page 966

I hadn't heard the Gary Cooper thing so I'm not grounded now. I feel pretty good. That's incredibly nice. When I met Robin [Williams] at the read-through, I remember when he came in, I was so nervous meeting him for the first time is incredible because I did actually write him a letter when I was a kid and told him he was my favorite actor.

For me, anything I do is totally up for conversation and it's not my right to be able to stop a person from writing whatever they want. What's harmful and hurtful is when people speculate.

I wouldn't write a book, because saying the word I over and over again would nauseate me.

It is odd that a value/virtue that plays such a central role in dramatic literature has played such a small role in philosophical writing. There are probably a number of reasons, but I think that a predilection for a certain kind of individualism is a major one. Others might include the fashionability of consequentialism, the idea that loyalty has more to do with sentiment than reason, as well as its proneness to corruption. The revival of interest in virtue/character as distinct from rules/principles has also created space for a renewed, if hesitant, interest in loyalty.

Writing is a long and lonesome business; back of the problems in thought and composition hover always the awful questions: Is this the page that shows the empty shell? Is it here and now that they find me out?

Good writing, and this is especially important in a subject such as economics, must also involve the reader in the matter at hand. It is not enough to explain. The images that are in the mind of the writer must be made to reappear in the mind of the reader, and it is the absence of this ability that causes much economic writing to be condemned, quite properly, as abstract.

I write with two things in mind. I want to be right with my fellow economists. After all, I've made my life as a professional economist, so I'm careful that my economics is as it should be. But I have long felt that there's no economic proposition that can't be stated in clear, accessible language. So I try to be right with my fellow economists, but I try to have an audience of any interested, intelligent person.

Authorship of any sort is a fantastic indulgence of the ego.

We shall have a race of men who are strong on telemetry and space communications but who cannot read anything but a blueprint or write anything but a computer program.

I never enjoyed writing a book more; indeed, it is the only one I remember in no sense as a labor but as a joy.

Only men of considerable vanity write books; consistently therewith, I worried lest the world were exchanging an irreplaceable author for a more easily purchased diplomat.

Before writing a single note of music, and even before the spotting session, I find it best to sit down with the director and just listen to him or her talk about the film - what they're trying to say, what they want the audience to understand or believe, and a thousand other similar questions. The director has most likely been living with the film for years before a composer is attached, and so the director's inclinations, desires, and understanding of the film are paramount.

I should write for the mere yearning and fondness I have for the beautiful, even if my night's labors should be burnt every morning and no eye shine upon them.

What had the board been doing when they see these things happening. I mean, you can write a law that says you cannot provide incentives for the openings of accounts, but I think it gets to be a deeper issue of the value structure of any organization and the value of its leaders.

How do you prevent people from doing inappropriate things? We can write laws. But at the end of the day, I actually wonder what the board was doing.

I try to write lyrics that will be able to function on their own if they get separated from the music. But I wouldn't want to take anything away from poets, who work without the frames songwriters get from melody, and I think lyrics should be considered as their own thing.

There are definitely parts of me in most of the protagonists I write, but I find a bit of distance can be useful, so I often find myself better able to write from a point of view that isn't exactly my own.

No one else writes like Gord Downie, so it's difficult to compare him. He can work in the abstract and still somehow be really specific. He lets parts of his consciousness in that most writers aren't able to do, myself included. I don't feel like I have that access to the surreal and the somehow beautifully meaningful non-sequitur - that fits perfectly. I can never figure that out, how he does that.

There is no ideal length, but you develop a little interior gauge that tells you whether or not you're supporting the house or detracting from it. When a piece gets too long, the tension goes out of it. That word—tension—has an animal insistence for me. A piece of writing rises and falls with tension. The writer holds one end of the rope and the reader holds the other end—is the rope slack, or is it tight? Does it matter to the reader what the next sentence is going to be?

It's kind of fun at my age to go back and talk to business-school people. I tell them, "I can summarize everything you need to know to lead a major corporation. Are you prepared to write this down?" And then they get all ready. I tell them I can summarize how I succeed as a leader: Listen to your employees, listen to your customers, shut the f - - up, and do what they tell you.

I'm not proselytizing my method. I don't believe that one writer should tell other writers how to write.

Before I began The Cider House Rules, I thought I wanted to write about a father-son relationship that was closer, more conflicted, and ultimately more loving, than most. Then I began to think of a relationship between an old orphanage director and an unadoptable orphan - a kid who goes out into the world and fails and keeps coming back, so that the old guy ends up with someone he's got to keep.

I'm a very old-fashioned novelist. I write 19th-century novels, where a lot of rules apply.

I have a process that I seem to always, to some degree, as a writer, adhere to, but I certainly have never imposed the way I write a novel on my students. When I had students, I never said, "You should never start writing a novel until you have the last sentence." I never did that, and I wouldn't do it now, but people now seem so interested in the process [of writing fiction] that I have to constantly make it clear when I describe mine that I'm not being prescriptive. I'm not proselytizing.

For most of my life, when I've finished the book I'm writing, there've always been as many as two or three other novels waiting to be written next. And the decision driving which one of them it should be was never based on how long it had waited or how many accumulated pages of notes I had.