A Quote by Mose Allison

I start out with words, with the idea, the line. Then after I get a line or two, I try to find what melodic line those lines would be suited to. As soon as I find the form I can finish the song in my head.
I think of shock as kind of an uptown form of surprise. Comedy is filled with surprise, so when I cross a line... I like to find out where the line might be and then cross it deliberately, and then make the audience happy about crossing the line with me.
In books, you can just wallow in dialogue, and you can just wallow in written words. In screenplays, every line has to serve the purpose of the line that's implied before it and the line that's implied after it. Maybe five lines have to do the work of fifty lines.
I write a line and then I revise the line and then I write two lines and then I revise lines one and two and then I write one, two and three and I revise one and two and then I write seven and eight and then I see that should be line four and I continually work it over as I go.
When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner's pick, a wood carver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year.
The two black lines on the armband means that they're the deceased's family. One line means they are either friends or acquaintances. One line of the arm, one line on the heart. The bastards who stood by my side with two lines, they'll be the hardest farewells I'll have to make in my life, and they're the luckiest fortune I've met in my lifetime.
A song doesn't happen as a whole verse; it happens linearly, line by line, almost word by word, phrase by phrase. And if each phrase, each line, has a proper emotional feel and connects to the line before it and the line after it, the song will be doing what it should be doing.
There are just long gaps where I can't find a point of insertion, I can't find a good opening line, I can't find a mood that I want to write into. But once I do, once a line falls out of the air, or I get a little inkling of a subject and I recognize that, it's like the sense that a game has started.
In the business world, those who are slow to act and adapt find themselves out of business in a hurry. In Washington, it can take 10 years to get even a good idea across the finish line.
When I'm constructing a poem, I'm trying to write one good line after another. One solid line after another. You know a lot of the lines - some hold up better as lines than others. But I'm not thinking of just writing a paragraph and then chopping it up.
When you write, you lay out a line of words. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory.
Find something that thrills you, and when you finish reading it for enjoyment, read it again line by line, paragraph by paragraph to see what you liked about it.
I look at whatever the finish line is for the character and then kind of act backwards from that and play him in such a way so that that finish line is more rewarding.
If I go back to the beginning, I could start it over again. I could go line by line; try and find a shorter way. I could try to make it... better.
Maybe the start line was supposed to be your finish line. Don’t be afraid to walk backwards.
There are many crooked lines and one straight line. Which is the line of truth? Why the straight line? Truth is always the shortest distance between two points.
Marvin Bell always looked very closely at how lines could break, how you could put over one line into the second line. How you could stop the line two or three times within the line: You could make it stop.
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