Writing Quotes - Page 980

I can play the guitar and the keys and the drums. I'm not brilliant at any of them. I can sing too. Some of my friends are proper musicians but I'm a song-writer. I write songs.

Human beings are the only creatures who have the ability to write down their goals and design their future. And here is why most of us don't. We're trapped either by regret of the past or the routine of the present.

Writing sketches, youre also learning about a journey and characters, and you translate that to bigger things.

I love discussing the ins and outs of the collaborative nature of writing.

I did always want to write. And then, when I left New York, where I was working very steadily in the theater - I had done three Broadway shows in a row and was a bit burnt out - I moved out to L.A. and I was not working very much. I came in cold and I'd work for a week, but then I'd have a month or two off. I thought, "I'm going to go crazy unless I actually do write." Like a lot of things in life, it was a situation that came about by circumstances.

Every time I think about writing, comedy doesn't interest me in the slightest. I can play comedy, but I don't think in terms of comic dialogue.

For several years I've been writing 100-word pieces. More recently I've been putting them together in groups of two and three. I don't see them as sequences, but rather as companion pieces, the way that diptychs often work. The idea comes originally from the paintings of Michael Venezia who places blocks of painted wood next to each other. Proximity is a godsend. The quote is from Wallace Stevens.

When I was 19 years old, I wrote my first book. I took a computer science class, and the book was garbage. I thought I could write a better one, so I did.

My writing is extremely important, so I write every day. I just enjoy it. I get a kick out of it.

[Kenneth Koch] taught children in public schools in New York City to write poems and told them down worry about rhyming, don't worry about any of that stuff. You know, write a poem where you mention three colors and make it five lines - or he would just give them, you know, little strategies. And, man, they wrote some great poems.

Just write a poem as if you're writing a note to one other person.

For me, writing plays is far more an act of the mind than of the emotions. It's a very different kind of impulse than fiction writing.

If anything, I've probably tended more toward humor in my writing and veered more toward pleasure in my personal life.

In my long, long years toiling around the publishing industry, I've found that women simply don't stick to the writing with the same fervor that men do.

I never want to think or write about the topic again when I'm finished with it.

I don't think comedians make an active decision to be a certain "persona." Comedians write the way they're going to write.

I don't have any delusions. I'm not a novelist - I'm a comedian who writes. I love doing the stand-up and the touring and the albums and all that, but it's pretty amazing to go into a library and see your book there.

People need to write articles and they need to have angles in them and I'm grateful when people are doing articles, but I always say there's not a great mystery to stand-up comedy.

For stand-up comedians that go onstage and get to write and perform and direct, and do all these things, the allure of a television show is still there but if it doesn't offer a level of creative fulfillment, it's oddly unappealing.

I realized, in removing or rewriting these jokes, that often the jokes weren't done or that I was using, for me, the curse words as kind of a crutch. So then I just started writing.

There's this message to comedians in particular, that you shouldn't write it, and a television writer should write it. And that's a prevailing conventional wisdom that I think is really wrong. That's not to say that television writers aren't great, but I think that the belief that some comedy writer's going to be able to capture your voice is naive.

I love writing stand-up so much and tinkering and looking for ideas.

I'm a big eater. I mean, a lot of my stand-up is about food, and you write about what you know, and that's the only thing I know. I don't know anything else.

I definitely write about things that are universal, that everyone can identify with. You're supposed to write about things you're passionate about and I guess I am a foodie. I do love food and it's kind of like I'm an eccentric observationalist guy. To make it kind of universal, I try a lot of different things. When I first started writing this, I was like, 'No food.' Then, you know, it just always goes there.

Comedians kind of write what comes to them. You can give yourself little assignments, but it's what inspires you. So I feel like with food, it is a passion of mine. It's where my sensibility rests. I love topics that are universal, and I love stuff that doesn't alienate people.