Top 1200 Writing Things Down Quotes & Sayings - Page 16

When I was a kid, I suppose I got more praise for being able to draw things and paint things than I did for my little amateur poems I was writing. But the thing that I'm trying to do with my painting is that I'm trying to keep it in the realm of pleasure. I don't show my work, I don't try to sell it.

When you fall down or slip in a situation, and somebody scores a goal, it's normal. These things happen. It happens to me; it happens to other players, I don't care about these things.

As I'm writing, I start to see connections, and themes I didn't see, and that sparks other things. So then I go back and rewrite things or alter them. It's a combination of intuition and a lot of finessing. It becomes a combination of the rational and the irrational.

Naturally, no writer who's any good at all would sit down and put a sheet of paper in a typewriter and start typing a play unless he knew what he was writing about.

One of the cool things about getting to audition for things on short notice is that it teaches you to memorize efficiently. So I've never been afraid of getting text down quickly.

For me, writing is a job. I do not separate the work from the act of writing like two things that have nothing to do with each other. I arrange words one after another, or one in front of another, to tell a story, to say something that I consider important or useful, or at least important or useful to me. It is nothing more than this.

Once readers and industry professionals have you pegged down as writing a particular type of book, they are less likely to try something new from you if they decided they didn't like the first one.

Some things go better than you expected, other things go worse, so I'm... I think the only sensible thing is just to wait and see and what I'm doing when I'm writing books - I'm not doing science so much anymore.

The first story I can remember writing, that I truly set down on paper, was a Christmas story that I wrote when I was ten years old.

The year is always correct, also the month, only the day can be another. But that occurs to me only in the moment of writing it down.

Write. Start writing today. Start writing right now. Don’t write it right, just write it -and then make it right later. Give yourself the mental freedom to enjoy the process, because the process of writing is a long one. Be wary of “writing rules” and advice. Do it your way.

I consider myself to be an inept pianist, a bad singer, and a merely competent songwriter. ... I'm probably writing music now for the same reason as I started writing songs when I was 14-to meet women. ... If you make music for the human needs you have within yourself, then you do it for all humans who need the same things. You enrich humanity with the profound expression of these feelings. ... My songs are like my kids.

Id like to make character-based dramas. I end up writing thrillers a lot - these psychological character-based things with weird people doing horrible things to each other - coming to a theatre near you!

When you are writing, you have to love all your characters. If you're writing something from a minor character's point of view, you really need to stop and say the purpose of this character isn't to be somebody's sidekick or to come in and put the horse in the stable. The purpose of this character is you're getting a little window into that character's life and that character's day. You have to write them as if they're not a minor character, because they do have their own things going on.

One thing we do really well on Archer and one thing I've always tried to do in my comedy and my writing and my podcast is to never speak down to my audience.

I would start by writing to an adult, maybe a high school teacher, or maybe an aunt or uncle, and writing and telling them why you want to go to a particular university. That's probably what you would actually sound like. Then write your letter to the university, and put those 2 versions in front of you, and look at the difference between those 2 things.

I was in the fantasy. I was selling myself on the fantasy as I was doing it. It never occurred to me. I did take notes, but just because I am a writer. I've been a writer since I was five. You don't have any sort of outlandish, shocking, extraordinary, horrifying experience without writing it down, because I know and knew that you forget things. No matter how outrageous and amazing and extraordinary and seemingly unforgettable an experience is, it's kind of like a dream. It will erode inevitably, for me.

While I'm acting I'm focused on what I'm trying to say through the character. And when I'm writing, I'm just putting down on paper or on the computer what I have to say.

I think actually one of the things you learn when you get older is, things change. You get a longer perspective. I was quite depressed when I was young. I had a dark cloud hanging over me. But I always felt "this is not the end." It's always changing; it's going up, it's going down. Great things will happen.

I started writing because I wasn't getting things as an actor.

There's no real formula for doing it, it's either just living life and writing down a joke you think of in the middle of the day and then pieces those together later.

Hip-hop is about tearing down the system to better it, tearing down the system to better themselves. No matter how flimsy it might seem, they always wanted the finer things in life.

It's my experience that people don't think of fiction writing as being as intellectually serious as other kinds of writing in academia and so without a career as a critic or essayist you can be treated as something of a spiritual medium - a fraud - for "just" writing fiction.

The best tip for writing is just to write; to sit down and write, to begin doing it and not to be scared by the blank page.

So much of the effort that goes into writing prose for me is about making sentences that capture the music that I'm hearing in my head. It takes a lot of work, writing, writing, and rewriting to get the music exactly the way you want it to be.

I've been writing, but I haven't been writing. In my mind I've been saying I want to write, but I haven't actually physically picked up a pencil and started writing.

Writing is great because in the writing you never have to... First of all you never have to leave your home. And you never have to meet the test of reality when you're writing.

I basically wake up at five in the morning and grab coffee and just get to the studio. And I have a list of things I need to get done every day. Sometimes it's just mixing, sometimes it's actually writing, sometimes it's writing, recording, and mixing. It all depends on what is necessary that day.

I think language is a system that we have devised to negotiate a series of more amorphous entities. It's a layer you can use to see where those things exist, but if you don't have anyone speaking anymore, those things are still there. The things that language stands for do not require humans, and in fact are often trampled down by humans.

I had to appreciate other things about music, like the writing and the cadence and dealing with producers. I became a student. I wanted to learn the actual idea of what this industry was before I could creatively speak a lot of the things that I wanted to speak.

I think all writers are mainly writing for themselves because I believe that most writers are writing based on a need to write. But at the same time, I feel that writers are, of course, writing for their readers, too.

The attraction to me was that Harvard was such a big community, with interesting things to do and interesting people, but you realise when you're there that things are a lot narrower than you thought. It's a little bit of a let-down.

I began writing and became attached to writing at an early age. I began by writing poetry and experimenting with dialogues: modest plays, in other words. I also used to describe at great length the way people in the area lived.

When I do get to chow down on a book, I try to read ones that are nothing like what I'm writing. So, as I'm currently working on a space opera (of sorts) I'm mostly indulging in urban fantasy.

I sat down to take a break from writing a book and wrote a spec feature that would end up being the movie 'Lies & Alibis' with Steve Coogan.

I can get really obsessive. I like writing many drafts, and I try not to because it is very time-consuming, especially when you're working on a novel. But I do like to take a story and reorder it, put things in different places. This allows me to see things in a new and sometimes surprising way.

I wasn't really writing anything that I felt was worth it at the end, but then certain things sparked me as a solo writer - to be able to try new things and experiment, and ultimately challenge myself as a performer and as a songwriter and just to commit to ideas, and not be afraid to be myself.

I don't think you could teach someone to be a genius, but you can certainly teach them to not make rookie mistakes and to look at writing the way a writer looks at writing, and not just the way a reader looks at writing. There are a lot of techniques and skills that can be taught that will be helpful to anybody, no matter how gifted they are, and I think writing programs can be very good for people.

I need to say to you. There are things in your life that only you will see, stories that only you will hear. If you don’t tell them or write them down, if you don’t make the picture, these things will not be seen, these things will not be heard.

Part of what makes for good writing is an ear for what we would call the poetical. Poetry itself is another thing and it seems to me to be the most difficult writing - that those people are the best writers and they lead the way for everyone else and their writing is frighteningly great.

The process of writing a book is infinitely more important than the book that is completed as a result of the writing, let alone the success or failure that book may have after it is written . . . the book is merely a symbol of the writing. In writing the book, I am living. I am growing. I am tapping myself. I am changing. The process is the product.

I think I've achieved some good things; doing the first genome in history - my team on that was phenomenal and all the things they pulled together; writing the first genome with a synthetic cell; my teams at the Venter Institute, Human Longevity, and before that Celera.

I don't like writing as an expert. I like writing as an amateur. I like writing as an idiot. It's much more fun to start in ignorance.

I loved everything. I loved sciences and I loved humanities. But ultimately, I felt that in the humanities, you know, you're writing about things that already exist. But in the sciences, you're discovering things that no one has known before. Ultimately I chose psychology because it seemed to combine science with things that I liked to think about.

Avoid all controversy in preaching, talking, or writing; preach nothing down but the devil, and nothing up but Jesus Christ.

I write, having seen what's happening already in my head. I see it as a movie, and I'm just writing down what's happening in front of me.

Writing or making anything-a poem, a bird feeder, a chocolate cake-has self-respect in it. You're working. You're trying. You're not lying down on the ground, having given up.

I never sit down to write. When I'm moved, I do it. I just wait for it to come. You just hear it. I can't really describe writing. It's in my head.

I do think they [French] view my writing itself as exotic - though that's probably not the best term for it - to a small extent, mainly because I say things that most French writers would probably hesitate to say for fear of offending someone or upsetting public sensibilities. I don't think that answers the question, but I'm not much good at figuring readers out or I would probably be writing bestsellers.

Most things good for writing are bad for life.

I play a lot of characters where I don't even speak in my own voice. I learned about focus and I learned to trust that things can work when they're not heightened and that it's interesting when things are pared down.

Prague is not, strictly speaking, travel writing but it is, among other things, an excellent example of what travel writing is becoming, if indeed it hasn't already done so. . . . People are no longer so easily satisfied by the mere travel impressions of some outsider much like themselves. Instead they gravitate towards writers who actually have lived not simply in, but inside, a location for an extended period, as one lives inside one's clothes.

My grandfather had been a newspaper reporter, as was my uncle. They were pretty good writers and so I thought maybe somewhere down the line I would do some writing.

I seldom know what I'm going to write when I sit down. There isn't much agony and sweat of the human spirit involved in doing it. The writing's easy, it's the living that is sometimes difficult.

Everybody used to be busy writing songs - great songs - that became hits. Now everybody's writing hits. Everybody's desperately writing a hit because they know they can't survive if they don't have a hit. Where in the past, we were writing a song like 'More Than Words' on a porch, not really believing it was gonna be a hit.

It looks like things are changing in north London. Tottenham have gone down a road they've never been down before. They've kept their best players and pushed young English ones through. They've started to match Arsenal - who were light years ahead - by building a new stadium.

I'd like to make character-based dramas. I end up writing thrillers a lot - these psychological character-based things with weird people doing horrible things to each other - coming to a theatre near you!

I don't know why I write. The honest answer is that I don't have an answer. I wouldn't die if I couldn't write fiction. Actually keel over and die - it's unlikely. But quite quickly writing has come to feel like the only thing I really know how to do. And I go a bit stir crazy if I don't write more or less every day. But that makes writing sound like a mood-regulator, a way to regulate anxiety or depression, and it doesn't really come down to that.

When you choose a show you really don't know where it's going to go. Sometimes things let you down and sometimes things just surprise you and fulfill you way more than you thought.

A distinction must be made between that writing which enables us to hold on to life even as we are clinging to old hurts and wounds and that writing which offers to us a space where we are able to confront reality in such a way that we live more fully. Such writing is not an anchor that we mistakenly cling to so as not to drown. It is writing that truly rescues, that enables us to reach the shore, to recover.