Writing Quotes

In '98, I locked myself in my house, went out of my mind and wrote 25 songs. I rarely bathed during that period of writing, I sent out for food, I didn't really venture out of my house in three or four months. It was a hell of an experience.

Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.

My new house has a deck that wraps around my writing room; my writing room has many windows, and outside the windows I've hung bird feeders... for enticing different species. So I imagine I will be writing about that.

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

I could write songs about politics, but I'm conscious of not writing songs that sound the same as the ones I wrote 30 years ago.

Writing allows me the time to travel and see the world, which is what I always wanted to do. I'd really like to have been Sir Richard Francis Burton, but it's the wrong century.

I think it's just a lack of ability, we're incapable of writing hits.

Writing is a really good first step toward that goal of knowing yourself.

I can't do a film if I don't start with the writing.

I did have a child, and I was reading a lot of picture books to her, but at the same time writing a children's book was something that I'd been wanting to do for many years, pretty much since the start of my career.

Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.

It wasn't my natural inclination to get into writing protest songs.

Writing children's books gives a writer a very strong sense of narrative drive.

When you're writing these things, you're in a room making each other laugh, you really have very little sense of political correctness or incorrectness. This is a question that Europe tends to ask and America doesn't.

Yeah I'm still writing. I've got about 14 tracks now. But we've been on tour so we haven't had time to get back to a rehearsal place.

I began writing in the 4th grade. As a matter of fact, I produced a play for the entire school. It was about Leif Ericson and the discovery of America.

Time spent researching varies from book to book. Some novels require months, even years of research, others very little. I try to do most of my research before I begin but inevitably questions emerge during the writing.

If you have a craftsman's command of the language and basic writing techniques you'll be able to write - as long as you know what you want to say.

At school I was always trying to con my teachers into letting me act out book reports instead of writing them.

The benefit of this kind of outlining is that you discover a story's flaws before you invest a lot of time writing the first draft, and it's almost impossible to get stuck at a difficult chapter, because you've already done the work to push through those kinds of blocks.

I view myself primarily as a trial lawyer who happens to be writing, as opposed to a writer who happens to be a trial lawyer, so the audience is like a jury to me.

I've been writing about James Fenimore Cooper. He was not a writer. Here was a man who was 30 years old and had never put anything more than his signature on paper.

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.

When you use words, you're able to keep your mind alive. Writing is my way of reaffirming my own existence.

I love opera, I love writing for the voice, I love telling stories with music.

Give me good writing, and I'll play it all day.

If you remain unsettled by a piece of writing, it means you are not watching the story from the outside; you've already taken a step towards it.

I have the feeling it will influence my future writing to the extent that without any material worries I could develop a greater ease, even lightheartedness, in my writing.

Writing is good, thinking is better. Cleverness is good, patience is better.

What interests me is what you might call vernacular writing, writing that connects you to a place.