Writing Quotes

Then about 1951 I began writing again, painfully, a novel I called in the beginning A Life Sentence on Earth, but which developed into The Tree of Man.

I'll be left writing picture books and fairy tales.

I was on cruise control from '85 to '95, and it was my fault. There were a lot of self-inflicted wounds, when I was not doing any original material. I wasn't directing. I wasn't writing. That's not who I am.

Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

I'm just writing a story that I want to read.

I can't help but laugh at all of you writing fake stories about me. I was not in any hit and runs. I don't drink so the DUI is false.

I have a very beautiful room that in my house that we bought in Princeton. It's glass on three sides, and you'd think that's the perfect place to write. Somehow in that nice room I feel too exposed, and I can notice I'm too distracted by things going on, so I end up writing in a not-very-nice office bedroom.

If you start writing to an audience you're talking down to them. I've never written for any age group, I just write character. If you can capture that you'll get the audiences, and it will be a wide range, as it is for 'Twilight,' it's a pretty wide range.

There will always be some kid who's the new Kurt Cobain writing great lyrics and singing from his soul. The problem is they're not marketing that anymore or putting it out there.

Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.

From a writing point of view, you now have teams of screenwriters working with a director. What's lost in the process is the power of that one heart, brain, gut and soul that makes something an original piece of writing.

Virginia Woolf came along in the early part of the century and essentially said through her writing, yes, big books can be written about the traditional big subjects. There is war. There is the search for God. These are all very important things.

Readers are what it's all about, aren't they? If not, why am I writing?

Vigorous writing is concise.

I've been doing nineteen hours a day on London, nothing else, I mean this has been my whole life, and writing has been put on one side, and if I'm privileged enough to be the Mayor of this city, then I will not write again.

Part of what I loved - and love - about being around older people is the tangible sense of history they embody. I'm interested in military history, for instance, because both my grandfathers fought in World War II. I'm interested in writing because one of those grandfathers wrote books.

I started out as a poet. I've always been a poet since I was 7 or 8. And so I feel myself to be fundamentally a poet who got into writing novels.

Modern as the style of Pascal's writing is, his thought is deeply impregnated with the spirit of the Middle Ages. He belonged, almost equally, to the future and to the past.

In my writing with Extreme, there are heavy themes. The cover photo has me with a gun to my neck. I am not advocating suicide. I am taking the philosophy that man is the measure of his own fate.

Writing the story of your own life is a bit like drilling your own teeth.

The digital revolution is far more significant than the invention of writing or even of printing.

So, the combination of looking at lots of different people and how they react to each other and how they relate to each other and waiting for that inspiration is the thing that allows me to keep writing.

I think the musicians I play with solo do a certain thing that the musicians we play with with the Indigo Girls don't do. It's just a different thing. And it sort of steers my writing in some ways.

My writing is remarkably non-confessional; you actually learn very little about me.

Now I'm kind of established as a director, I much prefer directing to writing.

Life sometimes gets in the way of writing.

When I became more involved in music, I had to give up some of my writing in the literary sense. However, on occasion, I would write something for my own pleasure or I would write notes and introductory remarks in the songbooks I put together.

I don't believe in writing anything that I don't know about or haven't researched about personally. I like to transport the reader to places, and in order to do that I have to do the research.

If you're actually allowing your creative part to control your writing rather than a more commercial instinct or motive, then you'll find that all sorts of interesting things will bubble up to the surface.

And music has always been incredibly cathartic for me, whether it's writing my own stuff or singing other people's music; it's very freeing.