Quotes About Writing

I don't know if I ever would have developed into a good actor, but that got completely scotched when I lost my vocal cord at 14 in the operation. But writing always - writing plays, writing, writing, writing, that was what I wanted to do.

I haven’t had trouble with writer’s block. I think it’s because my process involves writing very badly. My first drafts are filled with lurching, clichéd writing, outright flailing around. Writing that doesn’t have a good voice or any voice. But then there will be good moments. It seems writer’s block is often a dislike of writing badly and waiting for writing better to happen.

Everybody is writing, writing, writing - worst of all, writing poetry. It'd be better if the whole tribe of the scribblers - every damned one of us - were sent off somewhere with tool chests to do some honest work.

I approach writing a poem in a much different state than when I am writing prose. It's almost as if I were working in a different language when I'm writing poetry. The words - what they are and what they can become - the possibilities of the words are vastly expanded for me when I'm writing a poem.

Write. Start writing today. Start writing right now. Don’t write it right, just write it -and then make it right later. Give yourself the mental freedom to enjoy the process, because the process of writing is a long one. Be wary of “writing rules” and advice. Do it your way.

I never stopped writing. I started writing when I was twelve years of age. And I was writing all the time. But nothing was translated until thirty years after I started writing, when The Hidden Face of Eve was translated in 1980.

Right now-whether you're in writing courses getting "paid" in credit for writing, or burdened and distracted by earning a living and changing diapers-figure out how to make writing an integral part of your life. Publication is good, and gives you the courage to go on, but publication is not as important as the act of writing.

D.H. Lawrence, I think, defined the difference between writing an article and writing a novel very well. He said, in writing a novel, the writer must be able to identify emotionally and intellectually with two or three or four contradicting perspectives and give each of them very a convincing voice. It's like playing tennis with yourself and you have to be on both sides of the yard. You have to be on both sides, or all sides if there are more than two sides.

Nobody told all the new e-mail writers that the essence of writing is rewriting. Just because they are writing with ease and enjoyment doesn't mean they are writing well.

Writing more and more to the sound of music, writing more and more like music. Sitting in my studio tonight, playing record after record, writing, music a stimulant of the highest order, far more potent than wine.

For me, the Bild-Dichtung [image-poem] is the ideal form, because the drawing process is constantly being interrupted or contrasted by the writing. And since I always have something to say when I am writing, the effort has a balancing effect. Drawing and writing are wonderful complements.

As one of the first editors at 'Outside' magazine in 1975, it was my contention that most American writing going back to James Fennimore Cooper and then through Twain up to Hemingway had been outdoor writing. At that time, adventure writing meant stuff like 'Saga' or 'Argosy.' 'Death Race with the Jungle Leper Army!' That kind of thing.

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.

I hate being called lazy, so when everybody gets up at half seven in the morning, I'm up at the same time. Everyone goes to work and I'll do a few hours of writing, then I'll mess about for a bit and come back to it. By the time I go home I'm done. I think it's really good to keep that kind of a routine with writing. I find that when I don't do that, it's really hard to get back into that headspace of writing.

One of the things I had to learn as a writer was to trust the act of writing. To put myself in the position of writing to find out what I was writing.

I wanted to be a director first to protect my writing. I'm a playwright and you don't need to protect your writing when you're in the theater because everyone's there to protect the writing. When I had an idea for a film that I really cared about as my own, I wanted to direct it, and then I immediately became interested in directing in and of itself because it's such a deep art. You suddenly have all these tools at your disposal to tell the story.

I don't believe in writer's block, writing well is very easy; it's writing horribly, the horrible work necessary to do to get to writing well, that is so difficult one may just not be willing to do it.

Somebody told me I should try writing. Actually, a lot of people tried to get me to try writing, long before I thought I was 'the writing type'.

I began writing and became attached to writing at an early age. I began by writing poetry and experimenting with dialogues: modest plays, in other words. I also used to describe at great length the way people in the area lived.

People who've written about Abraham Lincoln's writing emphasize how logical he was. His writing was a syllogistic tool. He would say, if A, then B, and he would reason through it. His late writing especially is so tight and so beautifully reasoned.

When I am writing, even though it's hard and I do struggle often, I am happier than when I'm not writing. I feel alive. Whereas when I'm not writing, I feel like your common every-day neurotic.

I came out with a book called The True Secret of Writing: Connecting Life with Language. It's a book that describes how writing is a practice and how my teaching is part of that practice. I direct the writing and create books but underneath, there's always the river of practice happening. No good, no bad. Just do it.

When I started writing short stories, I thought I was writing a novel. I had like 60 or 70 pages. And what I realized was that I don't write inner monologue. I don't want to talk about what somebody is thinking or feeling. I wanted to try to show it in an interesting way. And so what I realized was that I was really writing a screenplay.

Reviewing music or reviewing anything is a writing job. It's nice if you are experienced in the field you are writing about, but writing is what you are doing.

It is a singular reaction, this sitting still and writing, writing, writing, or ruminating at length, which is much the same, really.

Critics stopped being relevant when they stopped writing to inform and contextualize, and when they started writing to signal who they are, to display their identity by their stance on what they are writing about. Criticism should never be about the critic, but thats what it has become, and that’s why no one cares about them anymore.

It wasn't a case of me sitting down and thinking, right then, what shall I do with my life? Airline pilot? Plumber? Guitar manufacturer? Writer .... yeah, writer. I've always loved writing, from a very early age--I guess I was writing my first stories when I was still in single digits. It progressed, and the love of writing grew in my mind and is still growing. Doing it full-time, there are different stresses and tensions, and the business side of it comes to the fore sometimes. But I still love it, and I'm always thankful that I can do what I do and make a living from it.

Do not beat up on yourself. Do not criticize your writing as lousy, inadequate, stupid, or any of the evil epithets that you are used to heaping on yourself. Such self-bashing is never useful. If you indulge in it, your writing doesn't stand a chance. So when your mind turns on you, turn it back, stamp it down, shut it up, and keep writing.

Writing-and this is the big secret-wants to be written. Writing loves a writer the way God loves a true devotee. Writing will fill your heart if you let it. It will fill your pages and help to fill your life.

Movies are definitely more fun because there are so many different seasons in a movie. It is exciting to be drafting together. Writing a book is very hard, it's like writing 15 college term papers in a row, and you are just like, "when is going to end?" You can communicate so much more when you are writing a book, and you can go so much deeper.

Writing a poem is a more personal experience, I think, than writing prose. And perhaps reading a poem is a more personal experience than reading prose, though that's harder to say.

Pivotal to a happy writing life is a practice of daily personal writing.

When you're writing for newspapers you have all these parameters. You can't swear, you have to use short paragraphs, all that. If you stay within those parameters, you have lots of freedom because you're writing for the next day.

Writing itself, if not misunderstood and abused, becomes a way of empowering the writing self. It converts anger and disappointment into deliberate and durable aggression, the writer's main source of energy. It converts sorrow and self-pity into empathy, the writer's main means of relating to otherness. Similarly, his wounded innocence turns into irony, his silliness into wit, his guilt into judgment, his oddness into originality, his perverseness into his stinger.

The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.

I do not believe that it is necessarily the duty of the writer to give a voice to his community. If a writer is true to his vocation, to his or her vocation, the very process of creativity enlarges these human horizons. It provides insights, even when you're not writing, when your writing's not dealing with a concrete political situation.

When you first start writing-and I think it's true for a lot of beginning writers-you're scared to death that if you don't get that sentence right that minute it's never going to show up again. And it isn't. But it doesn't matter-another one will, and it'll probably be better. And I don't mind writing badly for a couple of days because I know I can fix it-and fix it again and again and again, and it will be better.

I have felt the pain that arises from a recognition of beauty, pain we hold when we remember what we are connected to and the delicacy of our relations. It is this tenderness born out of a connection to place that fuels my writing. Writing becomes an act of compassion toward life, the life we so often refuse to see because if we look too closely or feel too deeply, there may be no end to our suffering. But words empower us, move us beyond our suffering, and set us free. This is the sorcery of literature. We are healed by our stories.

And it's just anathema to being a writer. It's not healthy. But in another way, when I'm writing, what it's about for me is being good on the page. None of that noise could change the way I feel about my writing. Which is not always particularly positive.

I try to make the writing as regular and regimented as possible. I usually get up at around 5 a.m. and read what I wrote the day before. Some of the time, after I read, I think the writing's very good and some of the time I feel embarrassed by what I've written. You have to learn not to pay too much attention to these feelings.

My writing is very organic. It's what I am. My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig. So I think of it as something that's very essential to my being.

In fact, sometimes traveling the world is a way of not writing a poem, but it's the quality of experience. It's being able to experience something and when you begin to write about it be able to apply the tools that you need for writing.

Don't you think it's rather nice to think that we're in a book that God's writing? If I were writing a book, I might make mistakes. But God knows how to make the story end just right--in the way that's best for us." Do you really believe that, Mother?" Peter asked quietly. Yes," she said, "I do believe it--almost always--except when I'm so sad that I can't believe anything. But even when I don't believe it, I know it's true--and I try to believe it.

Another strand of my writing is the importance of the idea. If you think about fiction writing as a spectrum, where at one end of the spectrum in the infrared, are the story tellers, and the people for whom creation of wonderful characters and telling a good story is the most important thing.

When you think about email or IMing, why aren't you writing back? I can see your avatar, I know you're online, why aren't you writing me back? But with Twitter, everybody sends their responses to Twitter, and Twitter then sends them out to everyone. So there's not this constant connection. You can be hyperconnected, then you can take a break for a couple days and it's fine.

My fear is you have to be careful as a writer to not get caught up in social media and blogging, because it can start to feed into your writing time. When you are writing a book, it's such a long journey where the payoff is way at the end, sometimes years away. The payoff of the blog post is today. You get the reinforcement, comments or "likes" immediately. It's appealing. You have to be patient with the book.

I don't do much of anything consciously in writing - in poetry writing, anyway, prose usually being a different matter, of course.

I've been writing songs since I was like six or seven. I've been writing poetry and short stories and stuff, but my first serious, serious song, I wrote when I was fourteen.