Top 1200 Writing History Quotes & Sayings - Page 18

When Shakespeare was writing, he wasn't writing for stuff to lie on the page; it was supposed to get up and move around.

I'm probably writing music now for the same reason as I started writing songs when I was 14 - to meet women.

I think comedy allows people to accept the more difficult parts of history. And history, if it's presented wrong, is just very depressing, particularly the history of slavery. If slavery is presented properly, it's a great story. But I think that within the commercial world of storytelling in which I live, there haven't been many strong works that discuss slavery in ways that are palatable and funny and interesting to the reader.

Writing is a performance art for me. They're very closely aligned, writing and performing. But I'm a writer, not a performer.

This time, we're living in such a crazy moment in history. People still write and talk about Watergate, which was such a huge, looming backdrop when I was coming of age and when I was a kid growing up. I think we're living in one of those times right now where, in 20 years, people will be writing and talking about it.

I love writing music, but it seems I'm always writing words, so I don't get much time to do it.

Before I started writing for myself, I was writing country records, and they were coming out dope.

I love the resource of the Internet. I use it all the time. Anything I'm writing - for example, if I'm writing a scene about Washington D.C. and I want to know where this monument is, I can find it right away, I can get a picture of the monument, it just makes your life so much easier, especially if you're writing fiction. You can check stuff so much quicker, and I think that's all great for writers.

Writing a screenplay is like writing a big puzzle, and so the hardest part, I think, is getting the story.

Writing sucks. I think it's terrible. Writing is not fun, and don't trust anyone who claims to enjoy it. Liars!

It's one of the strangest attributes of this profession that when we writers get exhausted writing one thing, we relax by writing another.

There is this split between the Haiti of before the earthquake and the Haiti of after the earthquake. So when I'm writing anything set in Haiti now, whether fiction or nonfiction, always in the back of my mind is how people, including some of my own family members, have been affected not just by history and by the present but also by the earthquake.

These are two opposing forces, and whenever I am in active politics, I stop writing. And when I'm writing, I don't politick.

Each of us has his own way of emerging from the underworld, mine is by writing. That's why the only way I can keep going, if at all, is by writing, not through rest and sleep. I am far more likely to achieve peace of mind through writing than the capacity to write through peace.

I'm not writing great literature. I'm writing commercial fiction for people to enjoy the stories and to like the characters.

Writing a song is like - you're writing a song all the time. It's just when it pops out. It's been there all the time. It's not something that suddenly you do it. It's always there. Suddenly, it's in the right mixture inside you to come out. Usually when you're writing on the piano or a guitar, you don't write in lyrics, on their own. To me it's very boring.

I spend a huge amount of time writing about the book instead of writing the actual text.

For me, writing for younger audiences and writing for adults uses two different halves of my brain.

Writing must certainly be one of the hardest professions - writing and painting.

There's a level of shame attached to our history, and we need to replace that shame with pride and own our history. These are our superheroes. These are our people, and I would love to see us own this side of our history with pride.

One of the hardest parts of writing is writing from the gut or the heart or something like that rather than intellectually.

There is no left and right in writing. There is only good and bad writing.

Writing provides no guarantees. And writers who stay with writing do it for reasons that are larger than self.

Just write and love what you're writing. And if you're not loving what you're writing, take a look at why and fix that.

I am in the Master of Professional Writing program teaching Humor Writing, Literary and Dramatic.

Usually when I'm writing, I kind of know what it is before I start writing and I write stream of consciousness style.

You find yourself writing the truth, because it's like, 'Well, I ain't writing for anyone but myself anyway.'

Whenever you're writing a book or creating a movie or a game, your first task is to get the reader/audience/player to suspend disbelief, to buy into the logic and boundaries of your world, even though those boundaries might include things like dragons and magic. To do that, you need long threads - of history and culture.

If Mother Culture were to give an account of human history using these terms, it would go something like this: ' The Leavers were chapter one of human history -- a long and uneventful chapter. Their chapter of human history ended about ten thousand years ago with the birth of agriculture in the Near East. This event marked the beginning of chapter two, the chapter of the Takers. It's true there are still Leavers living in the world, but these are anachronisms, fossils -- people living in the past, people who just don't realize that their chapter of human history is over. '

Writing for me, even what you call serious writing, is play.

If writing with a goal - whether it be evangelistic, apologetic, or didactic - implies propaganda, then all recorded history is propaganda. . . a work shouldn't be dismissed simply because of the strong convictions of the writer. Should we discount the facticity or reliability of the accounts of Nazi concentration camp survivors simply because they passionately recount their story?

My first writing jobs were writing Tom Arnold specials for HBO, so I love working there.

I write for the love of writing. If I never published another book, I would still be writing stories.

I was always writing music anyway. I just sort of fell into it. Writing for me is a therapeutic process.

When I'm writing well, I feel happy. And when I go too long without writing, I begin to implode.

Writing reminds you that you're never alone. Writing and reading is to be optimistic.

I'm writing in English; I'm writing for a Western audience, but the people I'm surrounded by in my daily life are mostly non-white.

If you want to take writing on, you should pay writing the respect it deserves, which is to say, reading it.

For me, writing is a way of finding out about things I didn't know before I began writing.

I'm not a reader of young adult fiction for the simple reason that these novelists are writing for adolescents, so they are not writing for me.

If a man means his writing seriously, he must mean to write well. But how can he write well until he learns to see what he has written badly. His progress toward good writing and his recognition of bad writing are bound to unfold at something like the same rate.

I was writing and cartooning and writing short stories from grade school on.

I think writing, my writing, is a species of mediumship. I become the person.

I work very hard on the writing, writing and rewriting and trying to weed out the lumber.

Not writing is as important as writing - go out into the world and remember how interesting it, and the people in it, are.

You can be far more challenging, articulate and intelligent writing for television than you can writing for the cinema.

For a long time, I saw writing prose as chewing rocks compared to the velocities of writing poetry.

[I] try to do both because the writing for me, to be a new artist, the writing is gonna pay the bills.

When you're writing, at least when I'm writing, I don't think about themes and I try not to sermonize with any particular message.

In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was. It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I don't believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God--who knows all that can be known--seems powerless to change.

Writing, for me, is the great organiser. It's while writing that I think most deeply about things.

For my students who are trying to learn the craft of writing in a writing class - contemporary literature is what's most useful.

Writing, real writing, should leave a small sweet bruise somewhere on the writer . . . and on the reader.

Writing anything as an expert is really poisonous to the writing process, because you lose the quality of discovery.

I'm trying my hand at writing. I'm writing a couple of projects for HBO, a half hour comedy and a miniseries.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

When you're really caught up in writing a poem, it can be a form of prayer. I'm not very good at praying, but what I experience when I'm writing a poem is close to prayer. I feel it in different degrees and not with every poem. But in certain ways writing is a form of prayer.

Oral history is a research method. It is a way of conducting long, highly detailed interviews with people about their life experiences, often in multiple interview sessions. Oral history allows the person being interviewed to use their own language to talk about events in their life and the method is used by researchers in different fields like history, anthropology and sociology.

I don't think there's any essential difference, at least for me, between writing poetry and writing prose.

I keep my TV writing and my book writing almost wholly separate. The audiences feel so different.