Writing Quotes

Writing for me is cutting out the fat and getting to the meaning.

I didn't necessarily have a total idea when I was writing the movie of where everything was going. I just wanted to have really realistic dialogue and write like people I knew talked. I tried to keep it very real.

I've been writing about my boyhood, when I was a little kid back on my grandfather's farm where we didn't know about black widow spiders or all that stuff. But writing about that is so easy.

When I'm writing, I'm trying to immerse myself in the chaos of an emotional experience, rather than separate myself from it and look back at it from a distance with clarity and tell it as a story. Because that's how life is lived, you know?

I was totally absorbed in the real world, the politics, the history, the news, and I just couldn't find my way into the fictional world... When I finally could return to writing the novel, it was in fits and starts.

I'm pretty grounded on my own passion - writing books, you know, doing programs, speaking around the country. And I love what I do.

Writers know that sometimes things are there in the drawer for decades before they finally come out and you are capable of writing about them.

Lyrics are so important, I hate every second of writing them, but it's something I take great pride in when it's finished.

Yes, I am aware that I have become a caricature. I've thought about this. Conceptually, what I'd like to do is the equivalent of writing myself out of the script.

I am 82 years old. I imagine that I will keep on writing as long as anyone wants to keep reading.

I know I stand visibly onstage, but my function is still unseen, because I rarely see the immediate results of what I am saying or doing or writing.

For me, writing is a love-hate relationship.

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.

I had been writing for about twelve years. I knew pretty well how you could find things out, but I had never been trained in an academic way how to go about the research.

Actually I was writing with people that didn't get records.

When I'm old I shall give up writing the big stuff and shall wander round the park thinking of songs.

As somebody who's been writing about this subject for getting on twenty years now, it's astonishing how the climate has changed in the last five years.

I'm writing an unauthorized autobiography.

I certainly think I'll end up writing about America in some form. I've taken plenty of notes. I like America very much.

This motion-picture muddle had distracted me from my writing.

In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas, a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed.

At the same time, it's a family story and more of an epic. I needed the third-person. I tried to give a sense that Cal, in writing his story, is perhaps inventing his past as much as recalling it.

After these three novels I gave up writing novels for a time; I was dissatisfied with romantic doom, yet didn't see much way around it.

I don't start writing a script until I can see it all in my head, then it's a matter of getting it down in white heat.

I don't teach writing classes anymore, and I'm really glad I don't, because I would feel very strange about telling people, 'Go out there and be a writer, and make a living from it.'

There are different rules for reading, for thinking, and for talking. Writing blends all three of them.

I've always enjoyed writing, I graduated with a degree in English; I've done bits of journalism.

I'm approaching a period in my life though where I'd like to be totally absorbed into music, doing concerts, writing something. Basically, that IS what I am doing.

Originality is not seen in single words or even in sentences. Originality is the sum total of a man's thinking or his writing.