About Writing Quotes

I'm the most communal person that exists and a very solitary person. So I think writing is a form of getting to the community and being alone, and it's the best of both possible worlds.

Truly I never thought of myself as writing legal thrillers, and I still don't think I do. I write stories about women.

I have four shelves covered with journals that I've written. Dad and I are writing songs together. I've probably written 100 songs.

Writing essays and teaching composition have helped me immensely in writing poetry, because they've forced me to focus on the structure of ideas.

I've been writing fiction as long as I've been writing poetry. It's just that the poetry took off, and it took me a lot longer to figure out how to write a story.

I never stopped writing music, I just stopped writing songs. I've been writing music continually ever since the last album of original tunes, "River Of Dreams" in '93.

I have enjoyed writing songs for so long... it felt like in order to make music that I could relate to myself, I would have to be a part of the writing process.

Pivotal to a happy writing life is a practice of daily personal writing.

With writing music and writing songs and recording music and coming up with stuff, you need to kind of reengage that kind of inner child to come up with interesting perceptions.

There's such good writing now on television and I don't see a lot of great writing on films sadly.

I wanted to be a composer for a while, and for a while, and maybe still, I found writing music much easier than writing poetry. So maybe my brain clings to it.

Good writing is difficult no matter what the reader's age-and children deserve the best.

With a television series, there's a hard deadline, and so you have to write even when you're not writing well.

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

I'm just writing love songs. I'm not trying to be pop. I'm not trying to be jazz. I'm not trying to be anything. I'm just writing love songs. And everyone loves a love song.

Not getting bored of my own story and/or character is one of the main struggles I have had with novel writing, and I have put to bed big chunks of work that just didn't sustain my interest.

Writing a book has about it some of the anxiety of telling a joke and having to wait several years to know whether or not it was funny.

In fiction writing ideas have to be handled extremely carefully. You can't let your characters just be mouthpieces for your ideas. They have to live and breathe on their own.

In fiction writing, I would say there are several different strands that have been woven through my own writing, and each influenced by a different group of writers.

I think it's more about trying to just focus exclusively on writing music and making that a viable, sustainable lifestyle. It's difficult because it forces you to really get creative.

I've been really enjoying writing articles and writing music and music for movies.

I'll be writing songs till I die. There's just no question.

There's no bad writing; you did something. I was operating inside language, and I did something. I'm not ashamed of it.

I grew up treating a life as a writer as a career in letters, one devoted to many kinds of writing. And so it seemed normal to study both fiction writing and the literary essay as an undergrad.

My favorite travel pastime is writing music, either with my guitar or on my computer.

I grew up on film sets but more around the process of making films. I saw a lot of the editing process and the writing process, which takes years. That really affected me growing up, that side of it.

When I'm not writing, I can't make sense of out anything. I feel the need to make some sense and find some order, and writing fiction is the only way I've found that seems to begin to do that.

Writing poetry is what I am. I wouldn’t know what else to be.

My writing process, such as it is, consists of a lot of noodling, procrastinating, dawdling, and avoiding.

I don't freestyle, but when I'm writing and thinking, sometimes things pop up - that's basically a freestyle.

I really think that if there's any one enemy to human creativity, especially creative writing, it's self-consciousness.

The idea of writing songs because you're depressed and you need to communicate it somehow, that isn't really true for me.

I always say that writing non-fiction versus writing fiction is a bit like architecture versus abstract painting.

I've been writing short stories for twenty years now, on and off ever since I was in the creative writing program at San Francisco State University.

Music is the first thing I ever cared greatly about. I've been singing and writing songs since I was six or seven.

I'm thinking of writing a book on national health care. It will be 2,000 pages, and you'll have two hours to read it.

My writing process has changed because it's harder to find uninterrupted time.

If my father were still writing essays, every full-grown 'girl' would probably be transformed into a'woman'.

There are a lot of us, some published, some not, who think the literary life is the loveliest one possible, this life of reading and writing and corresponding. We think this life is nearly ideal.

My father was a writer, so I grew up writing and reading and I was really encouraged by him.

[George] Orwell's essays. It's got it all. Great writing, a worldview that I find interesting and useful, and most of it timelessly true.

I'm composing and writing music.

I never feel more myself than when I’m writing; I never enjoy any day more than a good writing day.

Around the time I dropped out of college, I decided to start taking what I liked about short stories and apply it to writing songs - to make these things that would change and keep going.

Fiction writing is an act of imagination, lived experience is secondary in many ways, writing a novel really is all about inventing worlds and people.

I'm not a professional; I lack even basic knowledge about writing music.

You want to make a representative selection, but at the same time, you want to give a sense of the whole project. I have this big conflict in my writing life that I'm trying to work out all the time.

Novel writing is a kind of private pleasure, even if nothing comes of it in worldly terms.

Ready writing makes not good writing, but good writing brings on ready writing.

Teaching is all armchair. I learn about writing by writing and thinking about what I've written and throwing it away.