Re Writing Quotes

I can make music, but I can't play it. I read somewhere that Grieg couldn't play his A-minor piano concerts very well, but he could write. My role was to compose things, but not really play it.

I can only write songs when somebody gives me some water to swim in. Otherwise, I'm a fish on the beach.

It takes us a long time to write a song that we all really like, so it makes sense that it would take a while for the listener to get there, too.

The last thing you want to do is write songs about being in a band.

If there's an idea I think is really good and I feel like I can write it, then I'll do it.

When I'm there, it's pure silence. There are other writers there, too, and I get super competitive. I have this weird fear that some guy next to me is writing this amazing novel, so I got to compete.

To me, if the writing doesn't have rhythm, it feels dead. I lose all confidence. The music has to emerge to feel confident enough to move on to the next major chapter.

I have always been drawn to characters, and this was true for my feature-writing career as well, where there is a tension between rule-breaking and rule-following.

That was one of the key things - when you asked the story about the writing of the story - one of the things we wanted to make sure was that it grew out of.

I've written quite a few things, but I've put it on hold for now to see how everything fits together. Then I'll approach it and write specifically to see how the pieces fit in the puzzle.

When I write, I'm writing as a fan, and trying to come up with songs that I would want to listen to.

I write songs to handle emotional pain. I guess what they say is true: with every heartache comes a great song. I also pray and have great friends.

Honestly I don't like to write songs that often, only when I feel like I need to and when I've got something that I really want to sing about.

I've never gotten hired for drama because I'm a good improviser. I don't think people who write drama scripts want you playing with them as much.

Writing a poem is always a process of subtracting: you start with all of language available to you, and you choose a smaller field.

Usually form seems to find me in the process of writing a poem, though I have nothing against starting out with the form.

Poetic success is when you write a poem that makes you excited and bewildered and aglow.

In my own writing, I've mostly abandoned end-rhyme, but wordplay is still a huge part of my process.

I certainly believe you can write a narrative lyric or a lyrical narrative - why not a nyric or a larrative?

"Good" people are those who don't hold in the thoughts, but find proper outlets like writing, painting, music, etc.

I don't like writing for myself to sing. I prefer to have other people's voices to dispose of in some way that they'll like or not like or flatter them or not flatter them. It's fun.

I never go online on my iPhone. Sometimes I'm tempted but I remind myself and the kids - it's a tool. Use it as a tool. You're not the tool. My iPhone, 85% of the time I'm writing down ideas.

Writing novels is where I'm most comfortable. It's a very intimate experience.

Exposing characters and their shortcomings gives me great comfort. Its always great to write about someone more mixed up than yourself.

Much to my surprise, there's a sense for people in the cable industry that fiction writers might actually be good at script writing. You can write dialogue!

I don't want to say that having power is overrated, but powerlessness can give rise to a different kind of authority, and that's the kind of authority that writes books.

I like writing sentences. It's tactile and exciting. Whereas working at the level of the scene is a more cerebral pleasure.

I'm going to write what I feel like writing, which is a great place to be. But it can be hard to get there. It's so easy to get stricken with one kind of self-consciousness or another.

There's a kind of perverseness or betrayal in that idea that art is somehow superior to life. Or that it's more important to write well than it is to take out the garbage.

I thought, writing is everything, it's so much more important than this or that. If only I could give that young man a stern talking to. Having a child changes things quite a bit.

I've always found too that somewhere in whatever you've just written lies the seed of what you're going to write next.

Why not write a book which is as sophisticated as a book for an adult, but is about the concerns that teenagers actually have?

I write for teens partially to work out whatever it was that I needed to from my own teenage years.

Occasionally people ask me how it is I write different types of things, and my answer to that is it's very natural. You get bored writing one kind of thing all the time.

And writing I think is a gift that you have, the same as acting, in a way.

If you decide you're going to do the piece, you're doing it because you love the writing.

I've thought about writing, but it hasn't happened yet. It's like schoolwork - you start doing your revisions two nights before you're compelled to turn it in.

It was unavoidable, my writing. I feel I had no choice in the matter, no more than I had about an unfortunate bone structure and a healthy head of hair.

Being an author means, almost by definition, that you make up characters and then complicate their lives. That's it, really. You make up characters and give them problem after problem after problem.

I write in the most distressingly slow way in terms of punctuation and grammar.

I never set out to write books for children. I don't have a feeling that I'm gonna save children or my life is devoted.

I don't know how to write a children's book.

The fan mail I get from kids are asking me questions which they do not ask their mothers and fathers. Because if they had, why write to me, a perfect stranger?

I thought that if I were going into old age I would want to do what [Giuseppe] Verdi did, which is to write extraordinary things, and to really find myself.

I write every day as a matter of course It is not a burden. It is the way I live.

I believed that if I was to call myself a writer, I should live on writing. If I could not live on it, even simply, I should destroy every scrap, every trace, every notebook and live some other way.

A writer's life stands in relation to his work as a house does to a garden, related but distinct.

I began to ration my writing, for fear I would dream through life as my father had done. I was afraid I had inherited a poisoned gene from him, a vocation without a gift.

By its very looseness, by its way of evoking rather than defining, suggesting rather than saying, English is a magnificent vehicle for emotional poetry.

Every kind of writing is hypocritical.