Re Writing Quotes

So much emotion goes into writing fiction.

I don't write songs apart from theatrical pieces. I'm not interested in writing songs qua songs.

I didn't really want to write just lyrics, but I wanted to meet Leonard Bernstein. Music was always the first reason I was writing songs.

I'm used to writing stories with a beginning a middle and an end in four minutes.

Deeply funny musings and adventures elevate Paul Rudnick to the highest level of American comedy writing.

You can be writing every day. When you go on a road trip, the trip itself becomes part of the story.

People don't really have a relationship with great writing or great production or great art direction or great direction. They just sort of admire it.

Clichés are what good writing is all about. Because our lives are basically clichés.

I was writing music for the sake of writing music; it was just fun.

I have been writing poetry since 1975. My first poetry book was published in 1986.

I've been writing songs since I was a wee child.

In terms of people that I know, my grandmother and my mother are huge influences on my writing life because they are both massively supportive and always have been of my career.

I am always writing music. I have got unlimited ideas because I have been clean and sober for my entire life.

There is no pleasure in the world like writing well and going fast. It's like nothing else. It's like a love affair, it goes on and on, and doesn't end in marriage. It's all courtship.

Pico Iyer describes his writing as "intimate letters to a stranger," and I think that is what the writing process is. It begins with a question, and then you follow this path of exploration.

Good writing must stay open to the questions and not fall prey to the pull of a polemic, otherwise, words simply become predictable, sentimental, and stale.

One of the joys of writing music is making your own mark. Study other stuff, immerse yourself in music and then tell your own truth.

There is no way of writing stories that I haven't done.

It is an admonition to myself when I am reading other people's books. Writing a book is very difficult to do, even a bad one. I try to remember that when reading someone else's work.

Music is just a really fun hobby that I do, because I'm actually really good about writing songs and producing. People don't realize this, but I am an excellent writer for artists.

I found all my reading and writing informed my music in subtle ways. Ravedeath came out of studying the pipe organ, going to New Jersey - the world's loudest and biggest pipe organ.

You don't teach information in a writing workshop.

I'm not religious. I love what Clive James said the other day. James is a brilliant writer, but he keeps on writing poems on stuff. And he said, "God doesn't have a leg to stand on."

Nothing beats novel writing because it's complete expression of you. You just control everything. Not even a movie director has that level of control.

The interesting part about the writing process is that you can never see all the way to the end, not if something is happening over the course of a year and a half, or two years.

The best and only true history we have. Everyone interested in creative writing should know this book.

If I was writing songs just for me I'd only play them in my living room, alone.

I'm a total ho for any writing workshop, any technique from anyone.

I was an A student and I liked creative writing.

Writing music obviously comes from being inspired by things, and big changes in your life, and relationships and growing older and being more independent.

Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else

Whether you're writing a book or a song or whatever, you've got to be involved in it. It's got to come from the heart I think...that's what it's all about.

I've always just liked writing poetry, but it's much later that I've discovered that there's this whole poetry world out there, that you almost have to be accepted into, like this little club.

I was writing fiction steadily, but I found that the stark determinisms of code were a welcome relief from the ambiguities of literary narrative.

I always work with text orally in the writing process, saying passages aloud to measure flow.

Fiction writing is a strange business when you think about it. You sit down and weave a network of lies to explore deeper truths.

It's kind of alarming for me to realize that, when I'm writing stories about times I remember, it's already historical fiction.

Some of the best things that have happened in my stories have happened seemingly of their own accord. The writer becomes a listener, just writing things down as they come.

I can't imagine writing a book without some strong female characters, unless that was a demand of the setting.

[Jack] Kerouac was writing fiction. What he did when he wrote about me...he made me out with Russian Countesses and Swiss accounts and other things I didn't have or didn't happen and so on.

Good writing is lean and confident.

In fact, the very phrase "teaching creative writing" sounds to me oxymoronic. How can you teach someone to be creative?

I think I view myself primarily as a fiction writer. Poetry is more of a "hobby," a time of rest from the hard work of writing fiction.

The twentieth century saw a professionalization of fiction writing, particularly in its second half and particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world - not so much mainland Europe, for example.

I've always had a really great time being in movies and writing music when I get home. The more creative I am, the more it feeds into other creative aspects of my life.

Writing music is really personal, and it's a really exciting thing to participate in because represents the full creative process: It feels like something is coming from nothing.

What distinguishes Cambridge from Oxford, broadly speaking, is that nobody who has been to Cambridge feels impelled to write about it.

They wanted to come in after the pounds", explained Pooh, "so I let them. It's the best way to write poetry, letting things come.

I’d recommend learning to accept rejection. Become friends with rejection. Be nice to rejection, because it’s a huge part of being a writer, no matter where you are in your career.

Newspapers write about other newspapers with circumspection, ... about themselves with awe, and only after mature reflection.