Writing Quotes

I was always concerned with writing to my age at a particular moment. That was the way I would keep faith with the audience that supported me as I went along.

Probably having fallen in love with music and movies at a young age and then first learning about writing by kind of following the path of writers like Dave Marsh and Lester Bangs and being a rock journalist.

I became quite taken over by Johnson's personality at some points while writing the biography, and since I went straight on to The Closed Circle afterwards, I did sometimes feel I could hear him whispering in my ear while I was working on it.

I had never really thought of myself as a writer; any writing I had done was just to give myself something to draw.

Even when I'm writing plays I enjoy having company and mentally I think of that company as the company I'm writing for.

Writing is like jazz. It can be learned, but it can't be taught.

This was totally influenced by me and the direction that I am writing about and the stuff that I am writing about. There is just no way that you can be as intense as what I have been through in my life over a drum beat machine, sample, or loop; it's just not going to happen.

Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.

Everything I learned as an actor, I have basically applied to writing.

I despair of ever writing excellent poetry.

I am writing in the garden. To write as one should of a garden one must write not outside it or merely somewhere near it, but in the garden.

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

My whole life was writing, recording and touring over and over again. At some point I realised I wasn't enjoying myself any more.

When I was still in prep school - 14, 15 - I started keeping notebooks, journals. I started writing, almost like landscape drawing or life drawing. I never kept a diary, I never wrote about my day and what happened to me, but I described things.

Major writing is to say what has been seen, so that it need never be said again.

Then about 1951 I began writing again, painfully, a novel I called in the beginning A Life Sentence on Earth, but which developed into The Tree of Man.

I'll be left writing picture books and fairy tales.

I was on cruise control from '85 to '95, and it was my fault. There were a lot of self-inflicted wounds, when I was not doing any original material. I wasn't directing. I wasn't writing. That's not who I am.

Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

I'm just writing a story that I want to read.

I can't help but laugh at all of you writing fake stories about me. I was not in any hit and runs. I don't drink so the DUI is false.

I have a very beautiful room that in my house that we bought in Princeton. It's glass on three sides, and you'd think that's the perfect place to write. Somehow in that nice room I feel too exposed, and I can notice I'm too distracted by things going on, so I end up writing in a not-very-nice office bedroom.

If you start writing to an audience you're talking down to them. I've never written for any age group, I just write character. If you can capture that you'll get the audiences, and it will be a wide range, as it is for 'Twilight,' it's a pretty wide range.

There will always be some kid who's the new Kurt Cobain writing great lyrics and singing from his soul. The problem is they're not marketing that anymore or putting it out there.

Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.

From a writing point of view, you now have teams of screenwriters working with a director. What's lost in the process is the power of that one heart, brain, gut and soul that makes something an original piece of writing.

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.

Readers are what it's all about, aren't they? If not, why am I writing?

Vigorous writing is concise.

I've been doing nineteen hours a day on London, nothing else, I mean this has been my whole life, and writing has been put on one side, and if I'm privileged enough to be the Mayor of this city, then I will not write again.