Re Writing Quotes

Like when you have the right title for something you're writing and you get lost - you can always go back to the title and go, "Yeah, that's what this is about."

I remember going to see Amiri Baraka. It wasn't actually too long before he died. He said, "You've got to write to change the world!" I was like, "Not me, no, no, no, no."

I can't say that I love writing, but I do love the satisfaction that it gives me.

I really like telling stories. When I was a kid, I wanted to write songs. In quite a fundamental, gratifying, childish way, I enjoy the doing of telling a story.

I am never going to write about dogs again. You can write about Islam, you can write about sexuality, but no, not dogs.

Publishers are thieves, they are on the other side of the barricade.

Writing is rewriting what you have rewritten.

I wanted to write poetry almost a little more than I wanted to eat.

Writing is like this -- you dredge for the poem's meaning the way police dredge for a body. They think it is down there under the black water, they work the grappling hooks back and forth.

What the devil to do with the sentence "Who the devil does he think he's fooling?" You can't write "Whom the devil- ".

We all have these tendencies in us that could go this way or that. I think that's the real key in writing. To look at a character without judgment.

Unless I'm really uneasy with what I'm writing, I lose interest very quickly.

It takes me awhile to find something that I'm passionate about. I'm reading a lot and thinking a lot, and torturing myself a lot because I'm feeling really guilty for not writing something today.

I try not to think of actors as I'm writing because I think you do them a disservice by writing for things they've already done.

I like to knuckle down and get on with my job. I'll make mistakes, I'm bound to, but I'll write them down and I'll learn from them.

The writer learns to write, in the last resort, only by writing. He must get words onto paper even if he is dissatisfied with them.

At some time in their careers, most good historians itch to write a history of the world, endeavor to discover what makes humanity the most destructive and creative of species.

Sometimes I'll hear a phrase or a word and write it down in my little black notebook (a writer's best mate), then come back to it and work a plot around it.

Writing can be a very solitary business. It's you sat at a desk typing words into a computer. It can get lonely sometimes and lots of writers live quite isolated lives.

I believe that, like most writers, my personality comes through in the fiction. So in that respect my writing can’t be like any other author’s really.

I came up in the '60s; that was a time when there was a revolution going on in music. Stravinsky had become a twelve-tone composer; even Aaron Copland was writing twelve-tone pieces at that time!

I never thought that I would write orchestra music, but in fact I did write a group of orchestra pieces.

I need my trusty Mac laptop to write. I can't work with anything else. I'm used to the feel of the keys. I also like, more than anything else, Apple's Pages.

I write in Times New Roman, 12 point, and arrange the margins so that the screen looks like a page from a book. This spurs me on to make the writing as perfect as I can make it.

There are two things John and I always do when we're going to sit down and write a song. First of all we sit down. Then we think about writing a song.

But with writers, there's nothing wrong with melancholy. It's an important color in writing.

I just start singing some words with a tune. I don't ever write a song thinking, Now I'll write a song about... .

I think a domestic situation can change you and your attitudes. I suppose if you did get a bit content, then you might not write savage lyrics.

Every love song I write is for Linda.

John could write a mean song. He had a lot of venom in him. Whereas I had a happy childhood.

I'm not into, Hey, what's your sign? or any of that. But I don't know how I got here, and I don't know how I write songs. I don't know why I breathe.

I think when you're making an album, as the songs are piling up, one of the good things about it is that you will often write the song that you need.

It's not as if I'm trying to write crossword puzzles to which one might find an answer at the back of the book or anything like that.

What I try to do is to go into a poem - and one writes them, of course, poem by poem - to go into each poem, first of all without having any sense whatsoever of where it's going to end up

As a comedian, I'm like one of those on-the-scene reporters. I will actually go and try to find disasters so I can write jokes as the disasters unfold.

Life is but one continual course of instruction. The hand of the parent writes on the heart of the child the first faint characters which time deepens into strength so that nothing can efface them.

I'm not smart enough to write about something that didn't actually happen to me. But I couldn't write a space movie if you put a gun to my head.

If I heard there was a new show, and the creators were writing about how they met, I would be like, "Pass!"

No, I’m not one (of those) people who votes for something then writes to the government to ask them to send us money. I did not request any stimulus money.

My goal is to write stories that are connected, but not sequels in any meaningful sense. Like Howard's Conan tales or Leiber's Fahrrd & the Great Mauser stories.

I always work from outline and almost always write out of sequence. It just works for me.

[Writing] is harder than you think. You'll be rejected often. If you do it for money, you'll quit. Love it or don't do it.

Let those who will write the nation's laws, if I can write its textbooks.

My background is in improv and writing.

I'm always going forward toward something, and that something is usually an album, because I like to record. I probably like to record more than I like to write.

Autobiographies, for the most part, to me, are like writing a love letter to yourself.

When I write about my childhood I think, oh my God, how did I ever get from there to here? Not that any great thing has happened to me. But I felt so tiny, so lost.

Writing ... is practically the only activity a person can do that is not competitive.

People talk about the pain of writing, but very few people talk about the pleasure and satisfaction.

So with 'There Will Be Blood,' I didn't even really feel like I was adapting a book. I was just desperate to find stuff to write.