Writing Quotes

Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.

Right now we're in the process of writing new material for a new record.

I think I turned to writing really just to wake up in the morning and be a musician and to have something to do, and feel like a musician every day even if I wasn't working.

When I first began to write, I was writing on bass, because I was thinking more Public Image, more dub.

A lot of TV is put together by teams, by writing staffs and several different directors. It's a great, very smart way to make television. It's worked for however long TV's been around.

I like to be surprised. The best writing is when it defies me, when it starts going a different way than I had planned.

I think crime writing is my link with trying to preserve a sort of order.

I like pens. My writing is so amazing there's never a need to erase.

I enjoy writing but I much prefer the experience of having written.

The way they were writing Christine as this older woman who got married, which she shouldn't have. Obviously got divorced right away. Reached the glass ceiling in the police precinct. So there is a part of her that died because she knows she couldn't go any farther.

I think one of the things about writing in the studio is that the song hasn't matured, if you like, so quite often the vocals are early attempts. Whereas once you've taken it out on the road a bit, you learn more about a song.

I think of myself as a writer who happens to be doing his writing as an anthropologist.

In writing and politicking, it's best not to think about it, just do it.

Well, one thing I'm really interested in, when I'm writing, is being accurate.

The outstanding people realized that the job involved more than just writing a good strategic plan. It was also important that top management should understand the plan and be prepared to adopt it.

Books and all forms of writing are terror to those who wish to suppress the truth.

Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that.

Well I guess the plan was to write poetry and publish books and make a living from writing poetry. That was a pretty ambitious plan I guess.

If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing.

When writing isn't going well-then the bad thing about being a writer is that I also have the freedom and flexibility to do something badly, and no one else can fix it for me.

There is no way of writing stories that I haven't done.

I wrote a script. I actually enjoyed writing it more than acting. It's about the Irish rebellion of 1920, which is a fascinating period and place for me.

Every time I flicked channels, there I was, talking. I was talking too much and writing too little. So Naomi and I went to Hawaii. The phone was cut off and we lost touch. This gave me the chance to have a good think about my life.

I think some of the best modern writing comes now from travellers.

I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.

My only fantasy about writing was that in my old days, after directing many masterpieces, I would write my memoirs.

Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.

When I sit down to write, I don't think about writing about an idea or a given message. I just try to write a story which is hard enough.

I was writing notes, but not composing poems. The Hunter began to develop out of this fragmented process.

Jacques Derrida is a very important thinker and philosopher who has made serious contributions to both philosophy and literary criticism. Roland Barthes is the one I feel most affinity for, and Michel Foucault, well, his writing influenced my novel, 'Middlesex.'