Writing Quotes

I never walk into the studio and say, I'm going to write a song called... 'X' or called 'Slow Me Down.' I write a ton of lyrics, often the title is somewhere in those 10 pages of... I call it brain vomit. It's kind of like whatever comes out of my head and I'm unabashedly just writing it down.

It's hard for me to just practice without writing something.

Acting is easier - writing is more creative. The lazy man vies with the industrious.

I spend so much time on the screen when I am writing, the last thing you want to do is spend more time on the Internet looking at a screen. That's what I hate about all this technology.

I accept challenges, I have always done that in writing.

Because I don't have to be careful of people's feelings when I teach literature, and I do when I'm teaching writing.

The best writing is not about the writer, the best writing is absolutely not about the writer, it's about us, it's about the reader.

God flourished my ministry and my career of creative thinking, communicating and writing back 50 years.

I'm writing a book. I've got the page numbers done.

Which, of course, isn't the point of writing - but it would be nice if, along with the creative satisfaction of writing and seeing my work in print, I could do more than merely scrape a living. Okay, moaning over.

When you're writing for newspapers you have all these parameters. You can't swear, you have to use short paragraphs, all that. If you stay within those parameters, you have lots of freedom because you're writing for the next day.

It troubles me that people speak about writing for money as ugly and distasteful.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

I don't aspire to direct like many actors. I would aspire most likely to do some writing, but I haven't had a chance to do that.

As far as modern writing is concerned, it is rarely rewarding to translate it, although it might be easy. Translation is very much like copying paintings.

Just the type of music that was around at the same time as I was writing. Some of it was wicked, definitely. But there was just one direction which I thought could be pushed that no one was pushing.

I'm not in it for the money. I like music. I love to write music. I can't imagine myself not playing or singing or writing. It would just drive me crazy if I didn't.

Writing is like carrying a fetus.

I thought to spend my declining years writing poetry and teaching - but that won't pay the Bergdorf's bill. I think I'll move to somewhere life is cheaper.

I was writing a chapter of Beautiful Evidence on the subject of the sculptural pedestal, which led to my thinking about what's up on the pedestal - the great leader.

I thought my life was mapped out. Research, living in the forest, teaching and writing. But in '86 I went to a conference and realised the chimpanzees were disappearing. I had worldwide recognition and a gift of communication. I had to use them.

So long as readers keep reading and my publishers keep publishing, I plan to keep on writing. I'd have to be an idiot to be burnt-out in this job.

I'd have stopped writing years ago if it were for the money.

I've been writing joke songs since I was a kid and it served me well at S.N.L. I can write those in my sleep. In fact, I have.

However far fiction writers stray from their own lives and experiences - and I stray pretty far from mine - I think, ultimately, that we may be writing what we need to write in some way, albeit unconsciously.

Still, something about writing made me spend large hours of my free time at my desk.

I was probably 7 years old when I started playing the guitar and writing some serious songs.

In the writing of memoirs, as in the production of shows, too much caution causes the audience to nod and think of other channels.

It can get a little costly if you try and leave it until then to write songs. But you're writing all the time. You're collecting songs. I've had songs that have been collected over a two-year period for my next record.

And then writing, it was like I just found it, you know? Like you just found your favorite flavor of ice cream, all of a sudden there it is. 'This is what I should have been doing for the last thirty years. What was I thinking?' So I was, then I was in and then I had to just keep going with it.