Writing Quotes

It's bad writing, however naturalistic it's written, that's where you have to do your best acting.

Acting is glamour but writing is hard work, so I'm going to be an actress.

There's not too much difference between writing a picture book and writing a collection of a hundred poems or so, except that the bigger books take a lot longer to do.

Whether it's string writing or whatever, I try to write for what each instrumentalist can do best.

Fiction writing, and the reading of it, and book buying, have always been the activities of a tiny minority of people, even in the most-literate societies.

I don't think I'd ever make an album of just covers because I love writing my own music.

Writing of that caliber spoils you for any other kind of writing for awhile. But that's probably good.

But really, it was reading that led me to writing. And in particular, reading the American classics like Twain who taught me at an early age that ordinary lives of ordinary people can be made into high art.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Yoga introduced me to a style of meditation. The only meditation I would have done before would be in the writing of songs.

I think in any writing you're paying attention to detail.

Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists.

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.

The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.

I'm not so presumptuous to feel that they're gonna get it right away, get exactly what I have in mind. I hope that they'll enjoy looking at it at any rate, whatever it is. And that's why I started writing stories on my work.

One thing I've tried to do in writing music is take on very basic things, very archetypal things.

I'm too shy for personal appearances, and I've found out that anytime I talk about my writing, I can't do any writing for many weeks afterward.

In a newspaper, you only have so much room. It teaches you the value of getting to the point, of not pampering yourself with your glorious writing. I've always been much more interested in one powerful sentence that stays with you. That's my style.

I love comedy and I would write things to myself as an exercise in writing. I didn't do well for years, and I quit. I started to break down why I was afraid and started to look at people I admired, like Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, Freddie Prinze, George Carlin and all.

In writing the history of a disease, every philosophical hypothesis whatsoever, that has previously occupied the mind of the author, should lie in abeyance.

I do love using keyboards and I love writing keyboard parts, but I am not a player in the true sense of the word.

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

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

Somebody said writing is easy, you just sit down at your typewriter and open a vein. It depends on the book. Some, I have to do quite a lot of research, which I like. Others are much closer to me.

I didn't mean to be a songwriter; I just was writing for fun, you have all day to do it. I was homeless so that's all I had to do.

I cannot say that I write with any social objective. One writes because one loves writing, really.

So, the combination of looking at lots of different people and how they react to each other and how they relate to each other and waiting for that inspiration is the thing that allows me to keep writing.

I think technique can be taught but I think the only way to learn to write is to read, and I see writing and reading as completely related. One almost couldn't exist without the other.

I was born left-handed, but I was made to use my other hand. When I was writing 'Famished Road,' which was very long, I got repetitive stress syndrome. My right wrist collapsed, so I started using my left hand. The prose I wrote with my left hand came out denser, so later on I had to change it.