Wrote 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.

If I wrote a play with four characters every single one of them would talk like me regardless of age or sex.

Do you know what would hold me together on a battlefield? The sense that I was perpetuating the language in which Keats and the rest of them wrote!

And now it looks like I'm probably going to shoot a movie that I wrote. I got the money to do it, and I would star and all, because of being on Howard.

I was just 20 years old when I wrote Broken Arrow.

I wrote my earliest piece for The Sunday Times about being a young wife.

I wrote about people who liked fake fireplaces in their parlor, who thought a brass horse with a clock embedded in its flank was wonderful.

The Washington Times wrote a story questioning the authenticity of some of the suggestions made about me in Silent Coup. But as a believer in the First Amendment, I believe they have more than a right to air their views.

The only joy I had was writing what was. That book was. It no longer amuses me to be all the things I was when I wrote that. But it is my story as I was then.

It was a good 15 or 20 years before anyone at Rand would be in the same room with me. They didn't want the question raised, 'What's your relationship with Daniel Ellsberg?' And not one of them wrote me a letter because they didn't want a letter of theirs to show up in my trash - which the FBI had been going through.

I wrote my first books when I was single and then I got married and then had a kid and there were different things happening in my life.

When I read Andrew Motion's biography, I wept. It's something about the purity of the story and how fresh it was because of the love letters Keats wrote.

I think Henry Miller has had huge influence not because he wrote about sex, but because the memoir or the nonfiction novel has become such a monumental force in American publishing, if not in literature.

Someone wrote a piece about Henry Green in The Partisan Review that was so intriguing that I got one of his novels, Loving, I believe, which was the first that came to attention in the United States.

Since I wrote to you last we have got our chapel beautifully lighted with gas and have had our anniversary.

I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

Every time there's a revolution, it comes from somebody reading a book about revolution. David Walker wrote a book and Nat Turner did his thing.

As for action movies, I did Tarzan, and I'm also about to shoot Meltdown, which John Carpenter wrote.

If you've become a huge act and you're still doing the same music you wrote with your friends when you were making zero dollars, you're lazy.

But even before that, in 1980 I went so far as to write a book about what had happened. And I wrote all about the bank robbery, I went ahead and printed it even though I had no use immunity for it.

First of all, Shakespeare is about pleasure and interest. He was from the first moment he actually wrote something for the stage, and he remains so.

The Room I wrote in 1957, and I was really gratified to find that it stood up. I didn't have to change a word.

When I wrote the song, I had the sea near Bombay in mind. We stayed at a hotel by the sea, and the fishermen come up at five in the morning and they were all chanting. And we went on the beach and we got chased by a mad dog - big as a donkey.

I wrote my first play when I was eight.

Here is the difference between Dante, Milton, and me. They wrote about hell and never saw the place. I wrote about Chicago after looking the town over for years and years.

I was asked by a group to write a song on the theme of brotherhood. This was before women's liberation, when brotherhood meant men and women both, so I wrote the song. Since I had always been very fond of the Passion Chorale, I wrote words to that great piece.

I have spent over 60 years bent over a guitar and to know that I wrote 70 compositions that masters have recorded, that makes me feel so good and full, and proud and thankful to the good Lord.

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.

And that's how I wrote to NICAP, but then later, just very soon after that, like three weeks later, we started getting phone calls from government agents.

I wrote a book called The Taste of New Wine because I couldn't find a book that talked about the reality of the situation and how we were dishonest and afraid.