Writing Quotations | Page 3

Even when I interviewed bands, it was about asking them about writing songs, so it was more for me than anybody else.

I never write in a linear way. And I tell students not to. You can only know so much about a book when you first start.

If you write fiction, you're by yourself. There are certain advantages to that in that you don't have to explain anything to anybody. But when you get in with others who share the loneliness of the whole enterprise, you're not lonely anymore.

Maybe I would have become an actor. I was a very outgoing kid, but being in the hospital - being outside of social action for so long - turned me into an observer. Actually, right after I got out of the hospital, I did start writing a novel, but the book was so transparently about me that I stopped.

Writing is sort of putting a puzzle together halfway. Then, performing it has always been the completion of it. Once that happens, I'm feeling verbally communal with other people. It's out there and I feel so much better about it.

No one is drawn to writing about being happy or feelings of joy.

My writing has a lot of surprising twists,

I write about nerds who go the extra mile and become rock stars.

A literary critic is someone who can't write, but who loves to show he would have been a wonderful writer if only he could!

John Wells let me write a couple of West Wings, which was an incredible gift. I loved it once I got past the brain injury part of it, and so I'm working on a couple of things that are far from fruition, but what I want to pursue

It's funny: I put money into short films, and I put really good actors in it, and I write some stuff that's really funny, and I'll get, like, a million views. But to the right of me, there will be a video of a kitten that falls into a toilet bowl, and it's three seconds long, and it will get 25 million views.

Any great character is the combination of a brilliant actor and the right writing.

I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like child stringing beads in kindergarten, - happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.

I wrote about a bird that cleaned a crocodile's teeth. The story was so good that my teacher could not believe that a ten-year-old could write that well. I was even punished because my teacher thought I'd lied about writing it! I had always loved to write, but it was then that I realized that I had a talent for it.

I do have two data identities. I have my name, Bruce Sterling, which is my public name under which I write novels. I also have my other name, which is my legal name under which I own property and vote.

On my tombstone just write, 'The sorest loser that ever lived.'

I like to write a lot of satire.

I work eight hours a day, but I'm not writing all that time. I'm thinking, editing, looking something up. Thinking is what I do a lot of.

I'm going to write a whole pilot and see if anyone's interested, and if not then I'll just live out the tortured life instead of showing it on TV.

Sometimes I wish the writing and drawing were more integrated.

Unless one is a genius, it is best to aim at being intelligible.

I was standing in the schoolyard waiting for a child when another mother came up to me. Have you found work yet? she asked. Or are you still just writing?

Have you ever heard the expression: Walk a mile in my shoes, and then judge me? And write your own books.

When I'm writing, I am concentrating almost wholly on concrete detail: the color a room is painted, the way a drop of water rolls off a wet leaf after a rain.

I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.

When I first started writing, I was in advertising at the time, I was doing most of my writing on weekends. I had studied most of the other series heroes and I figured it would be fun for mine to be different and put him in and around water. So I dreamed up Dirk Pitt.

I'm not a born writer, and I don't enjoy writing.

I found 'The Twin' sitting on a coffee table at a writers' colony in 2009. It carried praise from J.M. Coetzee. That seemed ample justification for using it to avoid my own writing. I finished it - weeping - a day later, and I've been puzzling over its powerful hold on me ever since.

I work fitfully, in hope rather than in expectation, invent methods which last a week, and fill notebooks with tiny, illegible writing which often defies my own attempts to decipher it.

I know if I wasn't making music and acting, I would be involved in the performing arts world in some way. I would be either writing and making music for other artists or producing movies.

Keep it in tune with the times, but don't write with the specific purpose of trying to create a hit. If you're doing it strictly to make money, you're crazy. There are easier ways to make money.

I don't write songs about a specific, elusive thing. I write about love, and everyone knows what it is like to have your heart broken.

I think everything I write is from an atheist perspective. I mean, it's partly from an atheist perspective because I'm an atheist, and I'm just not really interested in religious-based questions.

I would get a lot of writing done if I lived in isolation in a cave under a swamp.

Breaking records is not something you expect to be doing. That's like a sports thing, it's not usually a comedy and writing thing.

I have turned away from the thought of writing fiction in the past through what I suppose is, actually, fear. The direct, raw invitation for the reader to come in and explore my imagination is fairly scary for me so I have busied myself with so much else.

A lot of people write books not at the end of their career. Why you gotta wait until then? When you're momentum's going, that's when people really want to get to know about you.

Writing is my primary way of expressing myself.

When I was 21, I got into a motorcycle accident while traveling in Europe and I had to lie around a lot in the aftermath, which was really the first time in my life that I became really focused and inspired to write.

The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.

People say I don't write books, I make Christmas presents.

Writing fiction, there are no limits to what you write as long as it increases the value of the paper you are writing on.

The basic drive behind real philosophy is curiosity about the world, not interest in the writings of philosophers.

I never laugh or smile when I am writing. When I come home for lunch after writing all morning, my wife says I look like I just came home from a funeral. This is not bragging. This is an illness.

I just sort of try to be a good person; try to write music that lifts people and makes me feel good to sing.

I suppose with any good writing and interesting characters, you can have that awfully overused word: a journey.

A lot of people go off and have fun adventures, or hard adventures, and their impulse is to write about them right away. What really makes a difference is having some perspective on what happened.

Satire is people as they are; romanticism, people as they would like to be; realism, people as they seem with their insides left out.

I have always tried to write in a simple way, using down-to-earth and not abstract words.

I've read somewhere that when you're writing, you should stop while you're doing well so you always want to go back to work.

Writing songs is super intimate. It's a bit like getting naked.

It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.

Write down the most important things you have to do tomorrow.

An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's.

The United States has made a massive effort since the end of the Second World War to secure the dominance of its films in foreign markets - an achievement generally pushed home politically, by writing clauses into various treaties and aid packages.

To write history is so difficult that most historians are forced to make concessions to the technique of legende.

In Braille you write your flat sign first and then your note.

When I write, it is always the melody that comes first, and it just happens to be the case that the most beautiful tunes are sad, and the lyrics follow the mood of the melody.

All my life, I will continue obstinately to write about love, solitude and passion among the kind of people I know. The rest don't interest me.

I'm too impatient to wait for things to happen to me. If I should be out of work for two months I would go crazy. So as soon as I'm free, I start writing. While it is necessary for me to write, I know that if I go too long without acting on the stage I don't feel well.

Writing for children is an art in itself, and a most interesting one.

I was probably never going to get to do the kind of things dramatically that I really wanted to do, so I returned to theater from time to time, and to write, and produce. It's by no means sour grapes.

Never give up. And most importantly, be true to yourself. Write from your heart, in your own voice, and about what you believe in.

Dogs and other animals - goats, donkeys, cows, a grumpy rooster - continue to change my writing life.

I would rather write for the instruction, or even the amusement of the poor than for the amusement of the rich.

Well, writing was what I wanted to do, it was always what I wanted to do. I had novels to write so I wrote them.

Why do I write? It's not that I want people to think I am smart, or even that I am a good writer. I write because I want to end my loneliness.

I still haven't quite caught on to the idea of writing without dialogue. I like writing dialogue, and there's nothing wrong with dialogue in movies.

Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.

I have rituals for cleaning out resentments, disappointments, heartbreak, depression and for work. One of the things I do is go over old stuff if I have been unable to write for a while.

If writers were good businessmen, they'd have too much sense to be writers.

After the children grew up, I began to focus on my writing. My first books were part of a trilogy... The 'Wind Dance' trilogy.

I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.

I make no claim to be an authority on writing or illustrating for children.

Poetry is the most intimate of all writing. I want to speak first from me to myself and then from me to you.

A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.

I write every day. I don't have a writing schedule. I write when I feel like it. Fortunately I feel like it all the time. I am writing for hours.

I write novellas because I don't like loose sprawling prose.

The beginning of a plot is the prompting of desire.

I asked Ring Lardner the other day how he writes his short stories, and he said he wrote a few widely separated words or phrases on a piece of paper and then went back and filled in the spaces.

Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author's phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea.

I may attempt a novel. I think that no matter what you write, it requires being honest with oneself, and you have to pull yourself out of the whirlwind of daily life.

I'm not happy when I'm writing, but I'm more unhappy when I'm not.

Judging from the letters I've received from obviously feeble-minded persons who wish I would write another These Old Shades, it ought to sell like hot cakes.

I write from what's in my heart. I write what I love and have always done that.

Like any kind of writing, there are good days and frustrating days. But even frustrating days can be rewarding sometimes.

Other writers definitely influence my writing. What encourages me and inspires me is when I read a good book. It makes me want to be a better writer.

I want to use things I learn about writing in my acting, and vice versa.

When I started writing, I didn't have the common sense to use a pseudonym, so I write under my own name. If I did have a pen name, though, it would be something very historical - something that sounds very sort of Regency... Sophia something.

I used to feel defensive when people would say, 'Yes, but your books have happy endings', as if that made them worthless, or unrealistic. Some people do get happy endings, even if it's only for a while. I would rather never be published again than write a downbeat ending.

I went to Morocco, joined a band called Pegasus, ran out of money, went to Gibraltar and worked on the docks, writing songs about the sun and the morning and the birds.

I got so anxious sitting in the make-up chair for hours with my face covered. I had my doctor write a prescription for valium. I couldn't have done it without the pill.

I use the setting of a small rural Norwegian community - the kind of place that I know so intimately. I could never write a novel set in a big city, because, frankly, I don't know what it would be like.

So often is the virgin sheet of paper more real than what one has to say, and so often one regrets having marred it.

Your emotional life is not written in cement during childhood. You write each chapter as you go along.

American literature had always considered writing a very serious matter

As human beings, we are the only organisms that create for the sheer stupid pleasure of doing so. Whether it's laying out a garden, composing a new tune on the piano, writing a bit of poetry, manipulating a digital photo, redecorating a room, or inventing a new chili recipe - we are happiest when we are creating.

Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.

I can't listen to music when I'm writing. I like music best in a car or on the train.

We live with our archetypes, but can we live in them?