A Quote by Joan Didion

There is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic.

Joan Didion

Quote Topics

Actually After Always Another Apparently Cannot False Imagine Imagine That Leaving Leaving Me Literally Me One Word Piece Point Put Room Sit Small Starts Stroke Suffered Word Writing

Quote Author

Joan Didion
American - Author
Born: December 5, 1934

Imagine a famine. Now imagine a piece of bread. Both of these things are real but you happen to be in the same room with only one of them. Put yourself into a different room, that’s what the mind is for.

Margaret Atwood

I don't have any office; I can write everywhere. So, I put a piece of paper on the table, and then I travel. Literally, writing for me is like travelling. It's getting out of myself and living another life - maybe a better life.

J. M. G. Le Clezio

If you're writing a piece for the Boston Pops, the balance is towards one end. If you're writing a piece for a chamber music society, then it's towards another point. I won't make a final answer on that. I think it changes with every piece.

Peter Maxwell Davies

I wouldn't exclude writing another song in German, but I don't want to translate songs anymore. We used to sit down and literally translate every song word for word - it was very technical, and the songs would lose so much along the way.

Bill Kaulitz

This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard.

Neil Gaiman

Reading any piece of writing aloud is an acid test, particularly when it comes to dialogue. There were writers I'd always admired who suddenly rang false when I spoke their words in our living room.

Anne Tyler

Sometimes you start flowing and shits starts adding on to whatever cipher you're dealing with. Meanwhile you got all of these thoughts in your head and you don't get enough time to put them down. That's another reason I started writing from the last word to the front word. It's methods to the madness. Sometimes I can't understand it or explain it but it is what it is.

Rakim

I will not sit in a room with black people when the N word is used. I know it was meant to belittle a person, so I will not sit there and have that poison put on me. Now a black person can say, 'Oh, you know, I can use this word because I'm black.'

Maya Angelou

I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at your desk and pick up your pen and finish writing when you put down your pen again; a writer is always writing, seeing everything through a thin mist of words, fitting swift little descriptions to everything he sees, always noticing. Just as I believe that a painter cannot sit down to his morning coffee without noticing what color it is, so a writer cannot see an odd little gesture without putting a verbal description to it, and ought never to let a moment go by undescribed.

Shirley Jackson

I would sit in my room and become hysterical about the wild incredible story I was writing. And I thought I was writing realism. It never occurred to me that I was writing absurdity. Realism and absurdity are so similar in the lives of American blacks one cannot tell the difference.

Chester Himes

I have all of Elizabeth Lowell's first editions. I love these books. They are among my most treasured possessions. I have carried them in boxes through college, law school, apartments and then houses. They have seen me through my darkest moments and inspired me to my greatest joys. I sometimes get scared thinking what would have happened to me if I hadn't started writing. I literally cannot imagine another life. And Elizabeth Lowell played a huge part in getting me on the right path.

J.R. Ward

I'm always writing. A friend of mine once said, 'You avoid re-writing by writing.' Which is kind of a good point, because re-writing seems to be mostly about craft, and writing is just, like, getting out your passion on a piece of paper.

Cameron Crowe

Extroverts want us to have fun, because they assume we want what they want. And sometimes we do. But "fun" itself is a "bright" word, the kind of word that comes with flashing lights and an exclamation point! One of Merriam-Webster's definitions of "fun" is "violent or excited activity or argument." The very word makes me want to sit in a dimly lit room with lots of pillows-by myself.