Writing Quotes

I try not to get analytical in the writing process. I try to just kind of keep the flow from my brain to my hand as far as the pen is concerned and go with the moment and go with my guts.

I ended up writing songs by taking stock of all the different events in my life, but all those songs were bad.

It's amazing to know that 5 years ago I was writing songs in a basement in the ghetto and now I'm writing for Michael Jackson. I'd be a fool not to say it's a dream come true.

The writing process is not just putting down one page after another-it's a lot of writing and then rewriting, restructuring the story, changing the way things come together.

Writing fiction is an endless and always defeated effort to capture some quality of life without killing it.

Sometimes, what probably makes writing songs really easy is that I've generally been attracted to situations that aren't always the healthiest.

Writing songs has a therapeutic effect, and it either kills off love or wins the heart of the lover.

I don't separate writing songs from poetry and short fiction. In the area where I work in my house, there's a word processor and a guitar.

I teach a non-fiction writing class at New York University, and one of my great pleasures is deciding on the syllabus.

Writing every day is a way of keeping the engine running, and then something good may come out of it.

There is no pleasure in the world like writing well and going fast.

Then l learned to play guitar and l started writing songs and my mother formed for me a publishing business, so we started publishing and managing artists.

It's a dismally lonely business, writing.

Good writing is rewriting.

The art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea.

You have a touch in letter writing that is beyond me. Something unexpected, like coming round a corner in a rose garden and finding it still daylight.

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis.

Good writing has an aliveness that keeps the reader reading from one paragraph to the next, and it's not a question of gimmicks to "personalize" the author.

I don't think it is an easy thing to write and expect to be commercial, even if you are from Venus and a hermaphrodite.

Writing anything, it sorta starts the way you'd build a castle at the beach. You're just taking your hands and you're mounting up sand.

You don't really know a woman until she writes you a letter.

For me, songwriting is something like breathing: I just do it. But that doesn't mean you're fantastic.

A lot of big labels will just sign bands like a write off.

If you're still watching, write in and we'll send you a fiver each.

You have to give your art everything you can - I don't mean only writing, but studying other poets and poetics, thinking, reading what poets have written other than their poetry.

Writing is a great comfort to people like me, who are unsure of themselves and have trouble expressing themselves properly.

Public art existed all along, but ecological art just naturally grew out of my thinking and writings in that area for years. I didn't get involved in it; I started what then became a movement.

real letter-writing ... is founded on a need as old and as young as humanity itself, the need that one human being has of another.

A story is not only meaning, it's music as well.

I am not writing in metaphors. I am writing about catastrophes.

The way this whole novel thing came together was, I sold them one bill of goods and then didn't communicate very well. I am like Captain Run-on Sentence.

Warhol influenced me because of his writing. If I had never read his writings and interviews, I would never have understood his work.

As far as I know, if you take your time, write a good script and make a good film, then give the audience time, they will accept it.

You think you KNOW when you learn, are more sure when you can write, even more when you can teach, but certain when you can program.

With songwriting I spend a lot of time living life, accruing all these experiences, journaling, and then by the time I get to the studio I'm teeming with the drive to write.

By the time I was at college, I became very alert to the question of racial discrimination, and I remember one of my first writing attempts had to do with a lynching.

In that moment, I could not write anything about flowers because I myself had turned into a flower, I myself had a stem and a lymph.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

To write fiction, one needs a whole series of inspirations about people in an actual environment, and then a whole lot of work on the basis of those inspirations.

It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

The best models of English writing are Shakespeare and the Old Testament.

When I was in the gulag I would sometimes even write on stone walls. I used to write on scraps of paper, then I memorised the contents and destroyed the scraps.

Most authors steal their works, or buy.

Water is the ink that writes the poetry of life.

In love, writing is dangerous, not to mention pointless.

What happens whenever we convert a writer into a symbol is that we lose the writer himself in all his indefeasible singularity, his particular inimitable genius.

the French write plays and paint as naturally as we play jazz - it's just a national gift.

As if a cookbook had anything to do with writing.

Every time I finish a book, I forget everything I learned writing it - the information just disappears out of my head

I want my stories to move people ... to feel some kind of reward from the writing.