Writing Quotes

Writing music is my therapy. It’s very purifying!

I also started writing songs because I had this burning activity in my heart and had to express myself.

Good writing is about finding and exploiting anecdotes that resonate with the reader. In storytelling, it's OK if you only make one point, as long as it's a good one.

In writing songs, I've learned as much from Cezanne as I have from Woody Guthrie.

I care about writing music and playing my music.

I feel like when I'm on stage, when I'm writing songs, singing songs, I'm in the studio, I'm shooting videos, I kind of get to become this character, and I can make that whatever I want to make that.

bad writing's like bad women: there's just not much you can do about it

I have long discovered that geologists never read each other's works, and that the only object in writing a book is a proof of earnestness.

Creative writing programmes are not very necessary. They just exist so that people like us can make a living.

I have epiphanies all the time, because I'm always thinking. I'm a thinker. I'm always writing poetry, I'm always coming to conclusions.

All good writing leaves something unexpressed.

When I went to college I took a creative writing class and decided in a week to be a writer.

Whether it is done quickly or slowly, however splendid the results, the process of writing fiction is inherently, inevitably, indistinguishable from wasting time.

I was not going to use writing for advertising or journalism. I would tend bar, load trucks, chauffeur - do whatever it took. But from the moment I took my first writing workshop, I was a writer.

I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems.

You know you’re writing well when you're throwing good stuff into the wastebasket.

The live show allows me to transcend myself, because it's not about me anymore. The writing process is very much about me but then the live show is not. They feel really different.

While I'm playing baseball, I'm still writing songs and having tapes sent to me. I'm sure I'll spend a lot of time in the whirlpool resting these tired bones, so I'll be thinking of music then.

I've always had standards about writing well. There is art in this business. There is potentially great art.

But I begin to think the chief difficulty in writing a book must be to keep out what does not belong to it.

Good writing is good writing no matter what genre you're writing in, and I believe that there are only a handful of fundamental craft tools that are essential for any genre-including nonfiction.

I do not like to write - I like to have written.

I've been writing music since I was 9. I took harmony and counterpoint classes when I was studying the clarinet. So, I've been writing for an awfully long time. It just became part of everyday life.

There is an art of reading, an art of thinking, and an art of writing.

Whenever I started writing music, it just naturally led itself there. As I started to tell my story, it's where my home was. It's just a very natural choice.

The writing life is a secret life, wither we admit it or not.

I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.

All you ever really want is a great character and great writing. As an actor, that's the juiciest sandwich you could ever ask for.

Writing code is not production, it's not always craftsmanship though it can be, it's design.

Before you ridicule, remember somebody on a railway platform who seems to be train spotting may actually be writing poetry.

I get drunk writing words. I don't drink or do drugs, but I get so carried away with writing that I get inebriated from it.

Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down.

When I started writing fiction it always seemed in retrospect (I didn't realise at the time) that it was always caused by environments rather than by incidents and characters.

I had made all these rules for myself: I'm not writing social commentary, I'm not writing love songs.

There is something unwholesome and destructive about the entire writing process.

There is something wonderful about singing and writing music, I think there is something special about creativity and the ability humans have in that area.

When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away.

Writing a book is quite an undertaking and I wouldn't want to do it just to do it.

My overnight success was really 15 years in the making. I'd been writing songs since I was 6 and playing in bands and performing since I was 14.

Letter writing is the only device combining solitude with good company.

I'm supposed to be writing a book, and I can hardly read.

Most of my work consisted of crossing out. Crossing out was the secret of all good writing.

“Et Tu, Babe” was born out of my absolute certainty that a writer’s life was solitary and insular, and I was happy with that. I love reading and writing, it’s my whole life.

I can't believe it! Reading and writing actually paid off!

I don't want to be known for anything other than writing songs.

I didn't really know what I was doing when I started. I just started writing songs. After two songs I just continued to explore it.

Beauty and truth may be attributes of good writing, but if the writer deliberately aims at truth, he is likely to find that what he has hit is the didactic.

Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.

I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don't know what I did before that. Just loafed I suppose.

When I'm writing poetry, 99.9% of my writing begins in English. I spent most of my life in English, although I am bilingual.