Writing Quotations | Page 2

And the thing about me is, I have a lot of mellow songs, because they're the easiest for me to write. I wanted to try to make some more upbeat songs, so, I ended up gravitating toward writing songs with friends, which was a great learning process, and also we came up with great songs. Those are the songs that came out the most naturally.

I've never set out consciously to write American music. I don't know what that would be unless the obvious Appalachian folk references.

I write about the power of trying, because I want to be okay with failing. I write about generosity because I battle selfishness. I write about joy because I know sorrow. I write about faith because I almost lost mine, and I know what it is to be broken and in need of redemption. I write about gratitude because I am thankful - for all of it.

My aunt could never understand how writing could be a full-time job. She'd keep asking when I'd get a real job!.

Because good writing in a TV cartoon is so rare, I think the animation on The Simpsons is often overlooked.

A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns.

I just sit at a typewriter and curse a bit.

Faithfulness to the past can be a kind of death above ground. Writing of the past is a resurrection; the past then lives in your words and you are free.

The most important advice I can offer is that writing is a craft that you can learn by practicing. If you keep writing, you will improve.

I think its so cool that you can pick up the guitar and create something that didn't exist 5 minutes ago. You can write something that no ones ever heard before. You have music at your fingertips.

I've loved singing since forever. Whether it was with my sisters while cleaning the kitchen, putting shows on for my stuffed animals, writing songs about my stuffed animals, starting an a capella group with my cousins while on vacation, or awkwardly singing along to karaoke tracks alone in my bedroom - singing always found a way into my life.

I do what I want to do. I see where my enthusiasm is. Over the years, my techniques expanded. That's how the writing came out.

In high school, I went to a place called the Mountain School. It's on a farm in Vermont, and I read Emerson and Thoreau and ran around the woods. Now I go hiking with a bunch of my comedy buddies. We talk about our emotions. I also do a lot of writing on hikes, just to get the blood flowing and the ideas moving.

Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.

I'm not an historian and I'm not wanting to write about how I perceive the social change over the century as a historian, but as somebody who's walked through it and whose life has been dictated by it too, as all our lives are.

The first writing of the human being was drawing, not writing.

I went into journalism to learn the craft of writing and to get close to the world I wanted to write about -- police and criminals, the criminal justice system,

I'm a crap guitarist and I find it really hard writing on my own.

Always write your ideas down however silly or trivial they might seem. Keep a notebook with you at all times.

No one who cannot limit himself has ever been able to write.

If you're going to write about someone's life, you don't just use them for wallpaper. You have to honor and respect that life.

Self-knowledge is essential not only to writing, but to doing almost anything really well. It allows you to work through from a deep place - from the deep, dark corners of your subconscious mind.

It's very hard to write a song alone. It's only by jamming that you can get a song together.

Writing Part of the Scenery has been a very different experience. I have been reminded of people and events, real and imaginary which have been part of my life. This book is a celebration of the land which means so much to me.

I actually love writing for teens best. I had such an awful time in my own teen years - I love having the chance to relive them through my fiction.

Artists don't talk about art. Artists talk about work. If I have anything to say to young writers, it's stop thinking of writing as art. Think of it as work.

Virginia Woolf came along in the early part of the century and essentially said through her writing, yes, big books can be written about the traditional big subjects. There is war. There is the search for God. These are all very important things.

I procrastinate in spades. In my defence, I also try to have all other distractions solved before I can concentrate on writing. My small theory is that to write for three hours, you need to feel like you have three days. To write for three days, you need to feel like you've got three weeks, and so on.

Wit ought to be a glorious treat like caviar; never spread it about like marmalade.

All these things that enter your head are assignments. You write them up and then throw them out there and if someone wants to do it, your assignment is done.

Only truthful hands write true poems. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem.

Silk Road to Ruin has all the analysis and it's structured very well. I rely on my notes more and I use direct quotes. But there's nothing like writing about it right away.

I want to see children curled up with books, finding an awareness of themselves as they discover other people's thoughts. I want them to make the connection that books are people's stories, that writing is talking on paper, and I want them to write their own stories. I'd like my books to provide that connection for them.

I love Charlie, Billy Burke's character. Writing for him is so spectacular, he's so funny and wry and every scene he's in he just takes. There's a scene in 'Eclipse' where Bella tells him she's a virgin, and it's the funniest, most awkward scene I've ever seen on film.

You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.

I never thought about writing. I was married young, I was still in college, as we did then, and I had two babies before I was 25, and I loved them, and I loved taking care of them, but I was a little bit cuckoo, staying at home and not having a creative outlet.

Under the Assads, Kurds were forbidden from learning their own language at school, or even from speaking it in the military. The result is a generation of Syrian Kurds, many now in late middle age, who cant write their own language.

I think I am less self-assured when I write English than I would be if I were writing in my first language. I have to test each sentence over and over to be sure that it's right, that I haven't introduced some element that isn't English.

I had to learn compassion. Had to learn what it felt like to hate, and to forgive and to love and be loved. And to lose people close to me. Had to feel deep loneliness and sorrow. And then I could write.

You care enough, that you want your life to be fulfilled in a living way, not in a painting way, not in a writing way...you really do want it to be involving in living, corresponding with other living objects, moving, changing, that kind of thing.

The recollection of how, when and where it all happened became vague as the lingering strains hung in the rafters of the studio. I wanted to shout back at it, Maybe I didn't write you, but I found you.

I think part of the appeal of mathematical logic is that the formulas look mysterious - you write backward Es!

I always feel a responsibility to the people I write about. I feel obligated to portray them in the way they feel is proper.

I don't think anyone could write about another culture and get it 100 percent accurate.

There's no better satisfaction than writing. I feel that writing is the best and everything else comes with it

The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.

I have written a memoir here and there, and that takes its own form of selfishness and courage. However, generally speaking, I have no interest in writing about my own life or intruding in the privacy of those around me.

Great heroes need great sorrows and burdens, or half their greatness goes unnoticed. It is all part of the fairy tale.

Books, I don't know what you see in them. I can understand a person reading them, but I can't for the life of me see why people have to write them.

However, please allow me to say that the fundamental style of my writing has been to start from my personal matters and then to link it up with society, the state and the world.

We sat around on a hotel balcony with a bottle of wine and tried to figure out how you would go about blowing up a planet. That's the kind of conversations science fiction writers have when they get together. We don't talk about football or anything like that.

What I do say is that I can write verse, and that the writing of verse in strict form is the best possible training for writing good prose

I really don't have an ear for pitch. I can't sing at all, I can't hum melodies and I can't write riffs.

I store away my experiences and don't feel really happy until I've found a way to write about them.

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.

For me, writing never gets easier. It's always hard work. It doesn't matter how many words you wrote the day before, or how many novels you've completed in the last decade: every day you start fresh again with that same blank page, or that same blank screen.

I've always thought of writing as sort of active communication.

When I write an original story I write about people I know first-hand and situations I'm familiar with. I don't write stories about the nineteenth century.

When I started writing, I did have some idealised notion of my dad as a writer. But I have less and less of a literary rivalry with him as I've gone on. I certainly don't feel I need his approval, although maybe that's because I'm confident that I've got it.

No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He's just too much himself and not you.

I like to sit down every day and not know where the book is going. I have no idea where the book is going to go or how it's going to end as I'm writing it.

The only book worth writing is the book that threatens to kill you.

I come to writing the same way I come to teaching, which is that my goal is always to create life-long readers.

During my past career as a journalist, I relished writing obits and equally dreaded phoning relatives for the necessary facts. But to my surprise and great relief, they often wanted to talk - they wanted their recently deceased loved ones recorded in print.

The biographer who writes the life of his subjects self-concept passes through a fade into the inner house of life.

My final historical romance came out December 2005. While I enjoyed writing medieval romances, I was also dying to write something with more edge.

I teach one semester a year, and this year I'm just teaching one course during that semester, a writing workshop for older students in their late 20s and early 30s, people in our graduate program who are already working on a manuscript and trying to bring it to completion.

Well, I'm a writer by nature, and I got a little bit - a little taste of a daily fast-paced writing job, writing career, and I loved it.

I think writing a poem is like being a greyhound. Writing a novel is like being a mule. You go up one long row, then down another, and try not to look up too often to see how far you still have to go.

So that's the dissenter's hope: that they are writing not for today but for tomorrow.

If you really want to know yourself, start by writing a book.

Writing for adults often means just increasing the swearing - but find an alternative to swearing and you've probably got a better line.

For me, playwriting is and has always been like making a chair. Your concerns are balance, form, timing, lights, space, music. If you don't have these essentials, you might as well be writing a theoretical essay, not a play.

I love Darius Rucker. He's a true artist, a great songwriter who can play his instrument, sing and write about his life.

Writing is only the frosting on my cake. Im whole without it.

I write essays to clear my mind. I write fiction to open my heart.

I don't write from dreams because I don't remember mine, but I had a fragment of an image left about twins, whose father was telling them how their lives were going to go for the next eight years. I wrote a scene about that, and then another and then another and then another, and after five months I had 732 pages.

I just love writing. It's magical, it's somewhere else to go, it's somewhere much more dreadful, somewhere much more exciting. Somewhere I feel I belong, possibly more than in the so-called real world.

I sometimes try to write something that is actually really simple and I can't do it. So, then, it's not simple anymore. It's really hard and it gets all messed up. I sometimes sit down and try to write a song with just three chords and it doesn't work.

I never write about CIA conspiracies or the FBI or mafia or anything like that because I just dont understand that world. But I think I do understand individual human harmfulness.

I'll only work on TV shows that have a 'Sookie' on them! Those are the only shows that will cast me. And I've never even met a Sookie in my life. Sookie on 'Gilmore Girls' was played by Melissa McCarthy. And Sookie, played by Anna Paquin, is number one on the call sheet on 'True Blood.' Somebody should write another script with a Sookie in it.

I write against the religion because if women want to live like human beings, they will have to live outside the religion and Islamic law.

Sometimes when you're writing on a ukulele, you're in a totally new land, rhythmically or melodically.

People have said to me, You can't write songs. You can't play an instrument. But I've got 10 gold records.

If I don't have a project going, I sit down and begin to write something - a character sketch, a monologue, a description of some sight, or even just a list of ideas.

When Maurice touched a keyboard, it was like something from a movie, magical. He would always give you something from a movie, and you'd go, what did you just play... immediately inspirational writings, amazing. That's what we're going to miss.

I think the world is ready for some rock 'n' roll. Some real time guys that play their own instruments, write their own songs, and sing the music and have a good time doing it.

Some people possess talent, others are possessed by it. When that happens, a talent becomes a curse.

Let there be no inscription upon my tomb; let no man write my epitaph: no man can write my epitaph.

I always want to write erotic music... Not only about the love between men and women, but in a much more universal sense - about the sensuality of the mechanism of the universe... about life.

I picked up the guitar at 11, but even before then, I was writing songs on the organ.

The journalism school helped me develop writing skills, and I had been enjoying cartooning from a very young age. My interest in puppetry, however, came much later.

I get a fine warm feeling when I'm doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day. Let's face it, writing is hell.

I want less and less control with music. Just playing music without any idea of composition or writing.

And the sad truth is that nobody wants me to write comedy. The Exorcist not only ended that career, it expunged all memory of its existence.

I did six series for the BBC and that was enough. I've been writing for ten years, which is more challenging artistically.

Screenwriting is always about what people say or do, whereas good writing is about a thought process or an abstract image or an internal monologue, none of which works on screen.

I enjoy what I do every minute of the day, even when the going gets tough. When I first began writing, I used to work at a desk in the bedroom, of a small development house. My three sons all under the age of 3 would come running in and out of the room every minute.

For graduate school I ended up going to the University of Iowa, which is, of course, the best graduate writing program in the country.

I do, however, think it would be difficult to write books I don't like to read.