Top 1200 Essay Writing Quotes & Sayings - Page 5

It was not a choice of writing or not writing. It was a choice of loving my life or not loving my life. To keep writing was always a first priority.... I worked probably 25 years by myself.... Just writing and working, not trying to publish much. Not giving readings. A longer time than people really are willing to commit before they want to go public.

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.

When you're writing - when I'm writing anyway - I'm writing out of different kinds of preoccupations and obsessions, different forms of drivenness, and so you're really hostage those while writing. I am, anyway. And it's only when you finally take the finished thing out of the furnace that you see what it was that went into the making of the thing.

I don't have the looks to compete at a bar, and I'm not that funny. So the last thing I want is to be in a situation where that's what I'm competing on. I'd rather be on OkCupid or Match, where I can write a 300-word essay about myself that's really good.

I wrote poems and an essay about that weird language. We still remember it to a certain extent, and it still comes up when we're all together. It's so fundamental to how I think.

I find writing the darker side, writing tragedy, a lot easier than writing happiness. Happiness is just less psychologically compelling, isn't it?

What I'm exploring right now is the subject of my own mortality. It's an area that I'm curious about, and I'm researching it to see if there's a photographic essay in it for me. If images don't start to come, I'll go to something else.

In writing, one searches, and that is what keeps one writing, that one sees and experiences things from another angle entirely; one experiences oneself during the process of writing.

Each time I had an internship to do or an essay to write, I would always do it in the field of cinema. Nobody in my family worked in film and nobody could understand it.

While I was in junior high, I wrote an entire essay in rhyme about manufacturing in New York State. In high school, I won a Scholastic poetry contest.

In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is, rather, a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears.

Writing teaches writing. Your writing will teach you how to write if you work hard enough and have enough faith.

The process of writing fiction is totally unconscious. It comes from what you are learning, as you live, from within. For me, all writing is a process of discovery. We are looking for the meaning of life. No matter where you are, there are conflicts and dramas everywhere. It is the process of what it means to be a human being; how you react and are reacted upon, these inward and outer pressures. If you are writing with a direct cause in mind, you are writing propaganda. It's fatal for a fiction writer.

History is a state of yearning. I yearn for Kay Lake throughout this entire thing. There's an essay I've written where I talked about living in the past. There's a whole motif in the book of then and now. And I lived there.

I like every part [of the film process ] except the business and admin stuff. The initial idea. Writing. Re-writing. Casting. Directing, Editing. If I had to chose I'd say writing, followed by putting music on the picture. That is magical.

Film writing and concert writing are two very different things. In film writing I am serving the film and it tells you what to write. I have to stay within the parameters of the film. In writing concert music for the stage I can write anything I want and in this day and modern age rules can be broken.

Well, the secret to writing is writing. It's only a secret to people who don't want to hear it. Writing is how you be a writer.

Why did the 14-year old Mexican girl end up pregnant? Because her teacher told her to go do an essay.

My preference is for good writing. It doesn't matter if it's for film or TV. Whatever. It starts with the writing. Even though I've had problems with writers, it doesn't matter how great of an actor you are. If the writing is bad, you're going to struggle.

One constant writing ritual, no matter what I'm writing, is that I cannot write if people are around me. It wigs me out - the idea that someone is reading as I'm writing stuff.

You can provide a short-format content, and it can grow, and it can spread virally across the entire Twitter system, and it can contain within it a link to something that's much longer, that's a long essay or that's a video.

You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life - the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.

Writing detective stories is about writing light literature, for entertainment. It isn't primarily a question of writing propaganda or classical literature.

I suppose writing nonfiction did prepare me for writing fiction. Whenever you write anything, you're honing your skills for writing anything else.

The writing workshops and programs that are everywhere have encouraged writing. And if that produces more writing, it's also producing more readers of an elevated level. So all in all, a good thing.

I may be writing well, I may be writing poorly, but I enjoy the act of writing and sometimes when it turns out okay, I feel an elation that is incomparable.

I am keenly aware that in writing about my mother, I am writing about my aunts' sister, and that in writing about my grandmother, I'm writing about their mother. I know that my honesty about how my view of these people has changed over the years may be painful.

I approach writing female characters the same why I approach writing male characters. I never think I'm writing about women, I think I'm writing about one woman, one person. And I try to imagine what she is like, and endow her with a lot of my own thoughts and history.

I hate writing. I so intensely hate writing - I cannot tell you how much. The moment I am at the end of one project I have the idea that I didn't really succeed in telling what I wanted to tell, that I need a new project - it's an absolute nightmare. But my whole economy of writing is in fact based on an obsessional ritual to avoid the actual act of writing.

Art was always my main focus; I fell into writing by accident in the 1980s, writing magazine articles to pay for my studio. I have to put myself into the position of writing; sometimes it doesn't work, and sometimes it works great.

You learn by writing short stories. Keep writing short stories. The money's in novels, but writing short stories keeps your writing lean and pointed.

Some say writing is its own reward. I write for money, but writing for money is not so bad, especially when that writing brings you joy.

I wanted to do 'Manzanar' because I'd never done anything like it before. The spoken word there is between a drama and an essay, and I'd never worked in concert with an orchestra.

Retiring from writing is not to retire from life, but retiring from writing is to avoid the inevitable bitterness which a writing career is bound to deliver as its end product, in almost every case.

You have to have an eye and a feeling for where things go. Writing visually, writing textually, writing sonically. Text is visual for me and images are textual. There is power in the way ideas are arranged, not just developed rhetorically. Form is everything.

Do three things each night before you go to bed: read a poem, read a short story, read an essay.

I don't like to use writing assignments, exercises. I think too often people get comfortable writing in that vein, but you can't go on to write a novel comprised of short writing exercises.

It's much easier to teach writing, because people are less shy about writing. If they're in a group, nobody can see what they're writing. When you're drawing, people get a little more nervous.

When really writing I'm not a good friend. Because writing disorganizes the social self, you become atomized. It scrambles you, sometimes to the point that I'm incapable of speech. I feel that if I start speaking, I'll lose the writing, like getting off the treadmill.

It's been noted that writing about the production of art is a masquerade or metaphor for writing about writing. This may be true, there are similarities - both the verbal and the visual represent the thing or the concept.

In 2011, I contributed an essay to Tin House, 'The Dark Side of Dinner Dishes, Laundry, and Child Care,' talking about women writers I felt had fallen off the map.

Writing for videogames is really unique. You learn all the rules of writing, but there's a whole other set of rules for game writing, and we're changing them as we move along as well, which makes it more challenging.

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.

Writing on my own versus co-writing kind of is the exact same thing because we don't sit in the same room when we write. We're always writing alone anyway.

Writing your name can lead to writing sentences. And the next thing you'll be doing is writing paragraphs, and then books. And then you'll be in as much trouble as I am!

When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical - one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float.

For me, writing is fun. The day I quit my job and take up writing full time, writing will become just another job. A commercial necessity.

Yet there are some critics in the nonfiction world who still look at some of today's stranger interpretations of the essay and say "You don't belong here. That's not how we do things." I think that's problematic.

A dry period for me means perhaps going two or three nights without writing. I probably have dry periods but I'm not aware of them and I go on writing, only the writing probably isn't much good.

Writing is writing to me. I'm incapable of saying no to any writing job, so I've done everything - historical fiction, myths, fairy tales, anything that anybody expresses any interest in me writing, I'll write. It's the same reason I used to read as a child: I like going somewhere else and being someone else.

I've been acting for so long it's more like - I won't say easy, exactly, but there's not the same angst with writing that comes about with acting. Writing - particularly when you're writing yourself, when it's you, when it's your life, you really can't hide.

I feel very much a part of what I'm writing about, and I'm writing about things that concern me on a daily basis. I'm not really interested in writing musical diaries, if you know what I mean.

What I'm exploring right now is the subject of my own mortality, It's an area that I'm curious about, and I'm researching it to see if there's a photographic essay in it for me. If images don't start to come, I'll go to something else.

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.

When I'm writing about reality, I'm writing about death. When I'm writing fiction, I'm writing about life.

I think film writing, you're thinking in pictures, and stage writing, you're thinking in dialogue. In film writing, it's also, you only get so many words, so everything has to earn its place in a really economical way. I think for stage writing, you have more leeway.

If you want to study writing, read Dickens. That's how to study writing, or Faulkner, or D.H. Lawrence, or John Keats. They can teach you everything you need to know about writing.

We need to be ambivalent - in the essay, and in life too. Ambivalence - having mixed feelings, entertaining contradiction, living with fluctuation - is a widened embrace. It's about the coexistence of things, and in that light, we have no choice in the matter.

I did 'Hawa' to understand what ghosts and the supernatural are all about. I don't believe in them and wondered how I could essay a part in a project I don't necessarily understand.

I reached a point where I'd watched enough directors do the job that I felt I understood it. And it's not that I'm a slow learner and it took me this long; I also was enjoying writing, and I still enjoy writing - I get tremendous satisfaction out of the writing end of it.