Top 1200 Writing Essays Quotes & Sayings - Page 9

What interests me is what you might call vernacular writing, writing that connects you to a place.

Teaching and writing are separate, but serve/feed one another in so many ways. Writing travels the road inward, teaching, the road out - helping OTHERS move inward - it is an honor to be with others in the spirit of writing and encouragement.

The very dull truth is that writing love scenes is the same as writing other scenes - your job is to be fully engaged in the character's experience. What does this mean to them? How are they changed by it, or not? I remember being a little nervous, as I am when writing any high-stakes, intense scene (death, sex, grief, joy).

Writing is sacred, other activities are profane, and I don't want them to corrupt my writing.

Writing was always a laborious thing for me. I never wrote fluently, I never wrote fluidly, there was something very awkward in my writing. But it seemed to me purposely awkward. It's almost as if I made the labor part of writing.

I make no apologies for any inconsistencies or contradictions in my essays. Those who do not change their minds in the course of a decade have probably stopped thinking all together. The true use of history, whether civil or military, is not to make man clever for the next time, it is to make him wise forever.

Writing fiction, there are no limits to what you write as long as it increases the value of the paper you are writing on.

Writing has taught me a lot - though far from everything - about writing, so as time has passed, it has become more pleasurable if not easier. I've done other things in life, but writing is by a factor of 10 the most difficult among them. And, of course, you never achieve what you set out to achieve, so you must keep on trying to do better.

It's much harder when you're writing about your life, than when you're writing fiction.

There's no better satisfaction than writing. I feel that writing is the best and everything else comes with it.

Well, predominately, if I'm writing for another artist, I'm sitting there with them and we're writing it together.

Almost all human affairs are tedious. Everything is too long. Visits, dinners, concerts, plays, speeches, pleadings, essays, sermons, are too long. Pleasure and business labor equally under this defect, or, as I should rather say, this fatal super-abundance.

When my second husband shouted, 'Me or your writing!' I replied, 'My writing.' We separated.

The only thing that makes me crazier than writing is not writing.

When you're not writing, you're not doing anything else either because everything you do goes into the writing.

People question what I thought of Oxford. Students used to talk about the 'Oxford bubble' because the place can make you feel cut off from the rest of the world. I would forget there were places like London that were not centred round libraries and essays.

I love writing traditional magazine pieces, and especially their breadth of reporting and the deliberateness of the writing.

Of all fatiguing, futile, empty trades, the worst, I suppose, is writing about writing.

So what comes naturally to me is writing lyrics and writing songs and telling stories.

The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make to them; a man may live long, yet get little from life. Whether you find satisfaction in life depends not on your tale of years, but on your will - Montaigne, Essays

I love writing dialogue, and I think a lot of my writing is visual and very cinematic.

So, whenever I'm writing, I'm writing in the presence of all the other books I've read and I think we all are.

The reason I shift gears constantly, why I'm doing an opera, why I've done essays, why I've written poetry for years that nobody wanted, why I do short stories and novels and screenplays... is so I will have new ways of failing. This means becoming a student again.

I'm out here to bomb, period. That's what I started for. I didn't start writing to go to Paris, I didn't start writing to do canvases. I started writing to bomb... destroy all lines.

I tried to fortify myself with the best nonfiction and fiction I could lay my hands on, from the essays of James Baldwin and Joan Didion, to the stories and novels of Ralph Ellison, Roberto Bolano and Celine. Distinctive voices like these were a source of constant nourishment on all range of matters, from punctuation to philosophy.

I wish I had time to do more reading, but I just haven't had much time. But I still find time for writing. I've always preferred writing over reading, even though those things do go hand in hand. But when I do have time, even if it's not writing music, just writing in general - ideas and stories and things like that.

The three things that help writing the most are living, writing, and reading. In that order.

For me, the hardest part is getting up and writing, that's the hard part. I always felt like I could teach someone to direct if I really had to. I feel like it's a skill that's passable, but writing... writing is the worst. That's what I'm doing right now, it's just the hardest thing that you'll ever do.

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.

To me, writing is fun. It doesn't matter what you're writing, as long as you can tell a story.

I was born in the era of the novel. I've written many, as well as collections of poetry, and essays for mouthing off. I've written to inches, word-counts, page-counts, even the sonnet and the screenplay (which I call a plot poem). I write narrative. That's it. I just want to tell it.

The easiest thing I do is assignment songs. They tell me what they need me to write. I can do that fairly quickly. Writing for an orchestra is difficult. Writing songs [on your own] is most difficult of all. Though [writing for] the orchestra is close.

Writing is not just the technical act of your fingers on the keyboard. Writing is living.

I don't think anyone is ever writing so that you can throw it away. You're always writing it to be something. Later, you decide whether it'll ever see the light of day. But at the moment of its writing, it's always meant to be something. So, to me, there's no practicing; there's only editing and publishing or not publishing.

Reading and writing don't inevitably go together. You can read without learning a thing about writing, grammar, or spelling, although, you certainly can't learn anything about writing, grammar, or spelling unless you read.

When I'm writing I don't dream much; it's like the dreaming gets used in the writing.

Writing with a film in mind - writing like a screenplay - is a sureshot recipe for disaster.

For me writing has always felt like praying even when I wasn't writing prayers.

Writing about racism requires a directness that writing a love story does not.

Writing of that caliber spoils you for any other kind of writing for awhile. But that's probably good.

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

'The Sopranos' all came down to the writing. I wouldn't have been on for as long as I was if the writing weren't so good.

A cookbook is not like being an author. It's writing down recipes; it's not writing.

What I can say is that it was clear to many of us that an indigenous African literary renaissance was overdue. A major objective was to challenge stereotypes, myths, and the image of ourselves and our continent, and to recast them through stories- prose, poetry, essays, and books for our children. That was my overall goal.

I'd really like to see smart sex writing, writing that can take sex apart and try to put it back together, that doesn't just put a box around "sex writing" and give it glaring neon lights but assumes that sex is part of everything else in our lives.

I like acting and things when I like the writing. If I don't like the writing, I don't like acting. I think in some ways everything starts for me from the place of writing.

O MY WIFE-who made the writing of my previous book a pleasure and writing of the present one a necessity.

I'm a fairly fast, but sloppy writer, so I'm a big fan of re-writing, and re-writing again.

I was writing since I can remember - I just didn't know it was poetry yet, or that writing could be a career.

Writing for the page is only one form of writing for the eye. Wherever solemn inscriptions are put up in public places, there is a sense that the site and the occasion demand a form of writing which goes beyond plain informative prose. Each word is so valued that the letters forming it are seen as objects of solemn beauty.

I'm writing new music all the time. I'm just not writing pop stuff. It's not my goal.

There's no better satisfaction than writing. I feel that writing is the best and everything else comes with it

I have been writing since I was old enough to spell. I have never considered not writing.

I figure I wrote 37 songs in 20 years, and that's not exactly a full-time job. It wasn't that I was writing and writing and writing and quit. Every now and then I wrote something, and every now and then I didn't. The second just outnumbered the first.

When I'm writing, I'm in an isolation chamber. I'm not one to think about that outside world stuff when I'm writing.

Ready writing makes not good writing, but good writing brings on ready writing.

The Internet is full of strangers, generous strangers who want to help you for no reason at all. Strangers post poetry and discographies and advice and essays and photos and art and diatribes. None of them are known to you, in the old-fashioned sense. But they give the Internet its life and meaning.

Writing novels is so much more satisfying than writing television.

There's no lack of writers writing novels in America, about America. Therefore, it seems to me it would be wasteful for me to add to that huge number of people writing here when there are so few people writing about somewhere else.

I do a lot of writing. People don't actually know how much writing really I do.