Re Writing Quotes

Everything in my life affects my writing. There are no separate parts of my life.

I have no special talent, you know. I never took a writing course before I began to write.

Outside of family, writing is essential. To me, it's like breathing.

Do you all have a living room floor or a bedroom floor? Then you can write a book.

I really don't have an ear for pitch. I can't sing at all, I can't hum melodies and I can't write riffs.

You do not write your life with words...You write it with actions. What you think is not important. It is only important what you do.

For me, language is something that I've always loved. When I read, that's what I look for. When I write, that's what I strive for.

I think one of the biggest mistakes you can make as a writer is to follow your initial [writing] plan too stringently. A story needs room to grow and evolve.

Writing a good query letter has very little to do with writing a good novel. But if you can't write the one, it makes it really hard to get the other published.

I love worldbuilding. It's as much fun for me as writing itself. It's like a hobby of mine.

You need to realize that most writing rules aren't laws, they're rules of thumb.

If you're going to have a book full of clever people and nobody ever jokes, it's just not going to ring true to the reader. That said, humor writing is the hardest kind of writing there is.

As long as I don't have an idea, I won't write anything.

Songwriting can be cathartic, but then you just keep it private. If you're going to play out and have other people listen to you, then you need to make sure there's some point to what you're saying.

I'm very comfortable writing in the first person; it dives into the character in a way that's difficult if you're writing in the third person.

What is the impulse that drove to direct? To me, it seems so immense. Just having a rock 'n' roll band, or to go from the solitude of writing and to having to collaborate, is almost schizophrenic.

Writing is not some quiet, closet act.

More than anything that's been the thread through my life - the desire to write, the impulse to write. I mean, it's taken me other places, but it was the impulse to write that led me to singing.

If I'm really working on something, writing or painting or really concentrating, I don't even think about brushing my hair.

I've always had a desire to write something and capture people's imagination like Peter Pan had captured mine.

After writing all day I go for a walk and see a piece of architecture i want to photograph and i have to take a picture and later a poem comes in my mind.

All the traumas I went through separating art from writing don't exist anymore. That's why I love being in rock 'n' roll. It's a whole life thing.

I'd try to write my poems in a certain rhythm. I had my rock 'n' roll stuff for performing and my denser stuff for writing.

I didn't write about aspects of my public life because that's a small part of my life.

I was so used to doing art that my fingers were like albino spiders. So it was just natural for me to go to a typewriter and write poetry.

Often when I write poetry I don't quite know what I'm saying myself. I mean, I can't restate the poem. The meaning of the poem is the poem.

My object when writing prose is to write as clearly as possible. I think I know what I'm saying in prose, and I want others to understand it and to be able to restate it.

I think parts of my soul have been saved by my writing, not in the sense of escaping death, but escaping the death of the moment, perhaps.

A poetic list is a talent in itself. You can write a list of things, and it can be boring.

I do love writing prose interspersed with the poetry of other people. Their rhythms break into my prose and create a connection.

I like to write, I like to do stand-up, I like to act.

In my mind, I was always a comedian who was going to branch into writing.

I'm always trying out new stuff onstage. That's where I do all my writing.

The process of writing is a process of learning; and much has become clearer to me in the attempt to transform my original rough notes into what I hope is an intelligible presentation.

Everything that individuals ever say or write can be used against them at a later point.

The kind of fiction I'm trying to write is about telling the truth.

Writing is, after all, a gesture towards other people, giving something to others. And so it's not a completely hermetic exercise. It's really an opening up.

Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn't write, I would stop breathing.

Nobody asks you to do this. The world out there is not panting after another novelist. We choose it

I never feel I'm standing on solid ground, and I do write with a certain kind of trembling fear.

I would say that Edgar Allan Poe, [Georges] Perec, Thomas Pynchon, and [Jorge Luis] Borges are all boy-writers. These are writers who take... a kind of demonic joy in writing.

When I am writing, even though it's hard and I do struggle often, I am happier than when I'm not writing. I feel alive. Whereas when I'm not writing, I feel like your common every-day neurotic.

After something crystallizes, I can write ferociously and write novels in six months, which in the past would have taken me two years.

Writing has always had a tactile quality for me. It's a physical experience.

I woke up one day and thought: I want to write a book about the history of my body. I could justify talking about my mother because it was in her body that my body began.

I don't read reviews any more, but I'm told by my publisher who gives me an account of what people have been writing and it's been a very split kind of response.

My characters, I find them as I'm writing. It's quite incredible how fully realized they are in my mind, how many details I know about each of them.

I've found that writing novels is an all-absorbing experience - both physical and mental - and I have to do it every day in order to keep the rhythm, to keep myself focused on what I'm doing.

Don't write about trying to change the world, just write about a changed world or a world that's not changing. Let that do the work.

It's all the same for me, how I teach, how I write, how I think.