Writing Quotes

Writing this book feels like a completely different activity from writing my comic strip because it's about real life. I feel like I'm using a part of my brain that's been dormant until now.

I'm drawn to almost any piece of writing with the words 'divine love' and 'impeachment' in the first sentence. But I know the word 'divine' makes many progressive people run screaming for their cute little lives, and so one hesitates to use it.

I started out writing much more science fictiony stuff and writing about science fiction.

My mother bought a piano, put it in the front room, and I just started writing my songs.

Universal literacy was a 20th-century goal. Before then, reading and writing were skills largely confined to a small, highly educated class of professional people.

I always thought writing was the foundation and the basis for journalism in the same way being able to draw is the foundation for art.

There aren't any rules, as far as anything-and that applies especially to writing songs, whatever gets the point across. So you're just kind of brought up to feel-in any field, if you say you can do it, do it. There it is.

Writing is manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe.

Early on, it's good to develop the ability to write. Learning to write is a useful exercise, even if what you're writing about is not that relevant.

I refrained from writing another one, thinking to myself: Never mind, I will prove that I am able to become a greater scientist than some of you, even without the title of doctor.

If you want your writing to be taken seriously, don't marry and have kids, and above all, don't die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that.

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 don't plan to write another science book, but I don't plan not to. I do enjoy writing histories, and taking subjects that are generally dull and trying to make them interesting.

For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel.

I never laugh or smile when I am writing. When I come home for lunch after writing all morning, my wife says I look like I just came home from a funeral. This is not bragging. This is an illness.

I've been writing a lot, I've a few projects I'm trying to finance, I do some acting, I do some directing... Apart from that, if I could get lower that a ten handicap on my golf game I'd be thrilled.

I've been writing for a long time. I sat down to write my first novel in the middle of March of 1982.

I'm not writing just about melancholy stuff anymore, I made a point to cover a wide range of emotions.

I didn't think about whether I was writing poems. I was thinking. And the more I was thinking, the more there was I didn't understand.

Early on, if I was alone two three nights in a row, I'd start writing poems about suicide.

If the desire to write is not accompanied by actual writing, then the desire must be not to write.

I tend to read more nonfiction, really, because when I'm writing I don't like to read other fiction.

I have some great stories and I will get around to writing a book.

U2 is sort of song writing by accident really. We don't really know what we're doing and when we do, it doesn't seem to help.

I like to think of myself at home in the armchair, writing, smoking and occasionally wandering down the shop.

The Fat Mattress consisted of people I'd played with before joining the 'Experience and it was put together as a song writing situation.

As the writer, you're always a presence in the song. If you get close to what human beings are like, you're writing about common experience. We all do much the same things, so if you nail somebody, then you've also nailed yourself.

A good writer cannot avoid having social consciousness. I don't mean this about small pieces of writing, but about a big book. If it's a big book, there has to be more than one undertow.

Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes the pressure off the second.

If people have bought something of mine, they know by now that I will decline writing it for the movies.