Writing Quotes

I'm looking for backing for an unauthorized auto-biography that I am writing. Hopefully, this will sell in such huge numbers that I will be able to sue myself for an extraordinary amount of money and finance the film version in which I will play everybody.

As a songwriter, I'm not necessarily writing about myself or my life.

I love new writing, new blood, modern works by unknown writers.

It's hard to read good fiction when I am writing, because if it is really good I catch myself sort of inadvertently imitating a great writer.

At that time, I had recently finished a book called Amazing Grace, which many people tell me is a very painful book to read. Well, if it was painful to read, it was also painful to write. I had pains in my chest for two years while I was writing that book.

I've been writing in notebooks for 40 years or so.

Failure in the theater is more dramatic and uglier than any other form of writing. It costs so much, you feel so guilty.

I remember being out here at the Sunset Marquis, and whoever knocked on the door, I would take that picture that I was writing and I would put that in the typewriter, so when I had the meeting, they would say: 'Oh, you're working on it right now?'

What I mean is that none of my talents had a - what's that great word - rubric. A singer, an actor, a dancer - there was nothing I could really say I was. The writing came much later. And, actually, thank God, because if I had said I'm a singer, I would really have just had one thing to do.

I began reading science fiction before I was 12 and started writing science fiction around the same time.

Now that I'm staring down the barrel of the last act of my life, I'm less excited about control and solo effort, and I resent the way the business aspects interfere with my space for creative writing.

No, I have to really focus, especially when I'm writing because I wanna be good at it.

I am a morning writer; I am writing at eight-thirty in longhand and I keep at it until twelve-thirty, when I go for a swim. Then I come back, have lunch, and read in the afternoon until I take my walk for the next day's writing.

I'm writing a movie about Mozart going to New York in the '60s. I've been reading so many novels.

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.

When I'm writing something, I try not to get analytical about it as I'm doing it, as I'm writing it.