Writing Quotes - Page 970

I enjoy both acting and screenwriting, in completely different ways. You have more creative freedom with writing because you can create everything that happens. But, as an actor you also have creative freedom because you don't so much focus on what has to move the story along, and only on how your character is reacting to situations.

I think that's pretty crucial for it to succeed and be something more than just something you put your kid in front of and turn on the DVD. We wouldn't have got involved if it were just for little kids. We wanted to write something that works on both levels.

I had always been interested in screenwriting, ever since I could write things down as a child. Obviously, I started as an actor, professionally, but screenwriting was always something that I had a great interest in.

The diary will really try and tell people who you are and what you were. The alternative is writing nothing, or creating a totally lifeless, as it is leafless, garden.

The absurdly neurotic role you and the rest of your kind have always attributed to me Erato, the Goddess Muse of Erotic Poetry bears no relation at all to reality. As a matter of fact, I was trained as a clinical psychologist. Who simply happens to have specialized in the mental illness that you, in your ignorance, call literature.

It's no good. I've been trying to sleep for the last half-hour, and I can't. Writing here is a sort of drug. It's the only thing I look forward to. This afternoon I read what I wrote... And it seemed vivid. I know it seems vivid because my imagination fills in all the bits another person wouldn't understand. I mean, it's vanity. But it seems a sort of magic... And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I did

Like all mystics (and many novelists, not least the present one) he is baffled, a child, before the real now; far happier out of it, in a narrative past or a prophetic future, locked inside that weird tence grammar does not allow, the imaginary present.

He felt himself in suspension between the two worlds, the warm, neat civilization behind his back, the cool, dark mystery outside. We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

I practice really hard, every day. I started that about 13 or 14 years ago; it's a discipline now. But the writing is a whole other thing. It'll come from handling a guitar, mostly; thinking up little guitar riffs. I was born and raised a rock 'n' roll guy, and that's the rock 'n' roll ethic, at least through my experience.

What happens is, especially when I was writing for my band, Creedence, and it's the way I write now, I go into "guitar lick" mode. When I do, it sort of leads into a real song. I'd say to myself, your songwriting is coming up with a guitar lick, and the rest is easy!

I feel like the future is unwritten. So many of the things that we write now haven't been about educating people on the environment, they've been about disseminating facts. But I feel like it could be productive to write something that explored directly the idea of fragility.

In this twenty-first century, there's no one like Sharona Muir who can write, in bright accurate language, animals real or imaginary in an updated bestiary that riffs on evolution, extinction, and what it means to be human among other species. We need this view, and you'll be right there with her on every page of Invisible Beasts.

I've learned the idea of pausing when agitated or doubtful. I can still write the e-mail but instead of sending that e-mail to the person I'm in a fight with, more often than not these days, I just delete it. Or I run it by someone else that I trust before I send it. And then I usually laugh at the e-mail and how funny it is.

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place. With this firmly in mind, he has no right to become discouraged just because other people are being published.

We deserve a president of the United States who will write laws for all Americans, not for campaign contributors. And I intend to be a president for all Americans who takes back the flag of our country because it doesn't belong to any party, doesn't belong to any president.

I believe in an America where the rights that I have described are enjoyed by all, regardless of their race or their creed or their national origin - where every citizen is free to think and speak as he pleases and write and worship as he pleases - and where every citizen is free to vote as he pleases, without instructions from anyone, his employer, the union leader or his clergyman.

Whether I serve one or two terms in the Presidency, I will find myself at the end of that period at what might be called the awkward age-too old to begin a new career and too young to write my memoirs.

Hell, I'm going to play pro basketball. I'm going to maybe be famous. I'm going to write books.

I'm still divided in my principles and what I think is right and what I'm actually able to do, whether talking about writing or being a citizen or being a husband or being a father. And I'm trying to get better.

Remember that a book is many drafts - mine certainly are. It's improvisation. It's as much jazz and the way we talk and the way I heard people preach coming up as it is writing.

What you create when you're teaching fiction writing is a kind of literary salon, not a social club or a mutual admiration society, not a debating society, not a repair shop, not a fight club or a soap box. It's a place to have a conversation about a story.

Place is character. And all writing is regional.

It's easier to write about a place sometimes when you've left it, when you can apply your imagination to your memory and let your emotions guide the writing about a place.

I write with a fountain pen. And then revise word by word and line by line so that the first draft of a scene is usually the tenth or so draft.

I was always writing. I just didn't know if I was any good.