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I write because it is while I'm writing that I feel most connected to why we're here. I write because silence is a heavy weight to carry. I write to remember. I write to heal. I write to let the air in. I write as a practice of listening.
Andrea GibsonI can't write anything for myself. I can write when I hear like [John] Coltrane play something; I used to write chords and stuff for him to play in one bar. I can write for other people, but I don't never write for myself.
Miles DavisWrite against patterns. Go against the devils. Write what you never write. Lie. Validate what you donโt validate. Indulge what you donโt like. Wallow in it. Write the opposite of what you always write, think, speak. Do everything against the grain!
Deena MetzgerTo read and to write. Some writers have to be told to write. They think their job is to meet agents and have experiences and they can just be rich and famous. Their job is to write. Some really don't realize that. And you can't write unless you read.
Ursula K. Le GuinI can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.
A. J. LieblingLike I say, I'm always writing and if something sticks, it sticks. I get to write with great songwriters in town. Lori McKenna is one of my all-time favorite singer-songwriters who's ever walked the planet. I get to write with her. The Warren Brothers are friends of mine and I write with them all the time. Lance Miller is a great songwriter. Tom Douglas - you can't get any better than that. I write a lot of stuff but it's got to stick.
Tim McGrawNow I don't really write for adults or kids - I don't write for kids, I write about them. I think you need to do that, otherwise you end up preaching down.
Jerry SpinelliI never had a plan, except to write. I love what I do, and have from the beginning. Loving what you do makes it a lot easier to work, every day, to face the tough spots and heel in for the long haul. Nothing against plans; they work for some people. But for me, if I'd been planning, worrying about numbers, trying to micro-manage my career, I wouldn't have focused on the writing. If you don't write, you're not read. If you're not read, you don't sell. So that's my Master Plan, I guess. Write the books, let the agent agent, the editor edit, the publisher publish.
Nora RobertsSometimes I write music, sometimes I don't. I think I'm just writing more what's close to my heart, and musical stuff is close to my heart, and it's fun to write, and when something's fun to write you don't think about what statement you're trying to make or what genre you're trying to hone in on.
Rachel BloomWrite like you write, like you can't help but write, and your voice will become yours and yours alone. It'll take time but it'll happen as long as you let it. Own your voice, for your voice is your own. Once you know where your voice lives, you no longer have to worry so much about being derivative.
Chuck WendigItalian is a very different poetic situation and there are these hard and fast rhythmic periods, settenari, ottonari of seven and eight syllables. These are fundamental to the way people speak and write and breaking them is more radical in Italian than when we break a line. I'm sure there are Italian poets who want to write poetry as prose and break these Petrarchan rules. And breaking them is fun and a valid thing to do. But I'm more interested in trying to write poetry that absorbs tradition and uses it in new ways, and doesn't throw it out.
Jonathan W. GalassiI didn't want to be apologetic about my love story, and I think to be willing to write about love you have to be willing to sound foolish. I wanted to write about foolish and goofy love and different relationships. I wanted to write about interracial relationships in a way that does not pretend as if race does not exist.
Chimamanda Ngozi AdichieOur moods do not believe in each other. To-day I am full of thoughts, and can write what I please. I see no reason why I should not have the same thought, the same power of expression, to-morrow. What I write, whilst I write it, seems the most natural thing in the world; but yesterday I saw a dreary vacuity in this direction in which now I see so much; and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder who he was that wrote so many continuous pages. Alas for this infirm faith, this will not strenuous, this vast ebb of a vast flow! I am God in nature; I am a weed by the wall.
Ralph Waldo EmersonYou cannot write well or much (and I venture the opinion that you cannot write well unless you write much) unless you form a habit.
W. Somerset MaughamAn average English word is four letters and a half. By hard, honest labor I've dug all the large words out of my vocabulary and shaved it down till the average is three and a half... I never write metropolis for seven cents, because I can get the same money for city. I never write policeman, because I can get the same price for cop.... I never write valetudinarian at all, for not even hunger and wretchedness can humble me to the point where I will do a word like that for seven cents; I wouldn't do it for fifteen.
Mark TwainEvery time you finish something ... you figure you've finally learned to write, right? Then you start something else and it turns out you haven't. You have learned how to write that story, or that book, but you haven't learned how to write the next one.
Grace PaleyWhen I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and is it is cool and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit again.
Ernest HemingwayMy advice would be to write -never to stop writing, to keep it up all the time, to be painstaking about it, to write until you begin to write.
Gabriel FieldingI think the first thing - if you want to be a writer - the first thing you need to do is write. Which sounds like an obvious piece of advice. But so many people have this feeling they want to be a writer and they love to read but they don't actually write very much. The main part of being a writer, though, is being profoundly alone for hours on end, uninterrupted by email or friends or children or romantic partners and really sinking into the work and writing. That's how I write. That's how writing gets done.
Cheryl StrayedI love to write and I assure you I write regularly... But I write for myself, for my own pleasure. And I want to be left alone to do it.
J. D. SalingerThe people who review my books, generally, are kind of youngish culture writers who aspire to write books, or write opinion pieces about what they think of Neil Young, or why they quit watching ER or whatever. And because of that, I think there's a lot of people who write about my books with the premise of, "Why this guy? Why not me?"
Chuck KlostermanI write lyrics really fast. When it's time to write, I usually put them off until the very end and then when it's time to write I can just sit down: I sing the melody, whatever the melody is, because that's the first thing that's already been there for a long time; I start singing it and I start creating consonants and vowels; then they turn into words; then all of the sudden one sentence will happen; then that sentence will dictate how the rest of the sentences happen.
Luke TempleIf you write a book set in the past about something that happened east of the Mississippi, it's a 'historical novel.' If you write about something that took place west of the Mississippi, it's a 'Western'- and somehow regarded as a lesser work. I write historical novels about the frontier.
Louis L'AmourWhen I first started writing, there was no way I'd write a sex scene. That just seemed impossible. That's why in "Fight Club" all the sex happens off-screen. It's all just a noise on the other side of the wall or the ceiling. I just couldn't bring to write in a scene like that. So one of the challenges with "Choke" was I wanted to write sex scenes until I was really comfortable just writing them in a very mechanical way.
Chuck PalahniukAlthough I write in English, and despite the fact that I'm from America, I consider myself an Armenian writer. The words I use are in English, the surroundings I write about are American, but the soul, which makes me write, is Armenian. This means I am an Armenian writer and deeply love the honor of being a part of the family of Armenian wrtiters.
William SaroyanI always write the end of everything first. I always write the last chapters of my books before I write the beginning....Then I go back to the beginning. I mean, it's always nice to know where you're going is my theory.
Truman CapoteI should write a book. I've always wanted to write a book. I should write a book about kids who see dead people.
George NooryIn the last volume of In Search of Lost Time, Proust compares himself to Scheherazade: he says he has finally understood the nature of the book he has to write, just at the moment when his advancing years and declining health have made him doubt that he's going to live long enough to write it. So he has to write against death like Scheherazade.
Elif BatumanWe have to accept ourselves in order to write. Now none of us does that fully: few of us do it even halfway. Donโt wait for one hundred percent acceptance of yourself before you write, or even eight percent acceptance. Just write. The process of writing is an activity that teaches us about acceptance.
Natalie GoldbergI do write nice songs about the guys who are nice to me! Eventually, I'm sure one of them will write a response - that's a pretty scary concept, actually! But I make sure I only write bad songs about the ones who deserve it.
Taylor SwiftNow I don't drink, and I get up in the morning and I write in my diary, and I can write in my diary for hours if I feel like it. And I'm still sober so I can write the stories that I'm working on, and I can sit at the desk as long as I need to. So that changed a lot, I think.
David SedarisI think going away and disappearing for a couple of years - or a few years, or whatever - definitely changed the way I look at songwriting. It made me feel more free, it made me feel more like I could just write what I wanted to write about. I wanted to write more observational songs.
Elly JacksonWith every script, I write a note to my collaborator that says: 'I write full script. But see it as a guide. You take us where we need to go any way you see fit. I tried to write something specifically for you. If you agree with my choices, fine. If not, you do what you have to do.'
Brian Michael BendisIf you can't think of what to write, tough luck; write anyway. If you can think of lots more when you've finished the three pages, don't write it; it'll be that much easier to get going next day.
Philip PullmanWhen I started doing these advocacy groups, it sort of propelled and compelled me to write songs, because otherwise I wasn't really sure what I was going to do, music-wise. I wasn't particularly motivated to write songs. But this level of humanity and spirit that I witnessed greatly impacted and so inspired me, so that I felt this sort of renewed vigor to write music. As far as how grounding it is, yeah, it's the ultimate amount of perspective.
Thao NguyenI tend to write pretty much by myself. I always did that anyway. I used to write with Ron Strykert 'cause he was the only guitarist and we played well together. We lived in the same place. I would play a certain style and he would kind of dance around what I did, in a sense. I learned from him and also vice-versa. With this band, I think I bounce ideas off everybody. Perhaps on the next album they'll be more collaborative stuff, but for the last 2-3 years, I've been pretty well writing by myself.
Colin HayLanguage the most forcible proceeds from the man who is most sincere. The way to speak with power, or to write words that pierce mankind to the quick, is to speak and write honestly.
Elias Lyman MagoonI write for a radio show that, no matter what, will go on the air Saturday at five o'clock central time. You learn to write toward that deadline, to let the adrenaline pick you up on Friday morning and carry you through, to cook up a monologue about Lake Wobegon and get to the theater on time.
Garrison KeillorWhen you develop software, the people who write the software, the developers are the key group but the testers also play an absolutely critical role. They're the ones who ah, write thousands and thousands of examples and make sure that it's going to work on all the different computers and printers and the different amounts of memory or networks that the software'11 be used in. That's a very hard job.
Bill GatesA lot of writers come from Harvard and such, and are rich, and they write under the misapprehension that poor people are stupid. So when they do write them, they are hillbillies or rednecks or Christian idiots.
Norm MacDonaldI can write with absolutely perfect penmanship with my feet. If I broke both my arms, I could still write a girl a love letter using just my toes.
Ian SomerhalderMy nutritionist says, 'If you bite it, write it.' Writing down everything that you put in your mouth really helps. I donโt count a damn calorie. But when Iโm really trying to eat healthy, I write everything down. It really holds me accountable and puts me on a healthier path.
Tyra BanksThe danger of these collaborations across disciplines is in having too strict of a division of labor - in my case, of getting stuck doing the music. When I make an album, I write music, I write lyrics, I come up with the visual design, etc. I get to do all of that stuff.
David GrubbsFor me, no matter how serious the subject is, when I try to write about it, I have to write about it from a comic point of view. It's just the way it comes out.
Julie DavisI suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.
Neil Gaiman