Top 585 Wrote Quotes

In ’57, I got a job at the Blue Angel nightclub, and a gentleman named Ken Welch wrote all my material for me. I lived at a place called the Rehearsal Club that was actually the basis for a play called Stage Door.

Sir Walter, with his 61 years of life, although he never wrote a novel until he was over 40, had, fortunately for the world, a longer working career than most of his brethren.

When I was four, I wrote a song about falling into a black hole.

And then I wrote my first autobiography when I – well, it was 23 years ago. And since then I’ve written about one book every two years.

I sat down one night and wrote the line rock, rock, rock everybody.

I wrote… Neon Ballroom in that time where I hated music, really everything about it, I hated it.

I love rare books. Not that I own a lot of them, mind you. You couldn’t quite call me a rare-book collector. But I did once work in a rare-books library, and I wrote a novel about a rare book.

‘Pitchfork’ said something like, ‘Michael Imperioli wrote a book that sounds like Lou Reed fan fiction,’ which maybe it is. It’s fiction, and I’m a fan. But it’s not about me, and it’s not a Lou Reed book.

I think I settled on the title before I ever wrote the book.

For 35 years, I was a writer. I wrote a lot of jokes. Some of them weren’t funny. Some of them weren’t appropriate. Some of them were downright offensive. I understand that.

I’ve written a song for Prince. I never showed it to Prince, but just to see if I could do it. At the time, when I sort of knew him, he was recording a song a day. I wondered if I could do that. So I wrote it.

I wrote in the book very specifically what I wanted to write about, period, and left it at.

I wrote the song For A Dancer for a friend of mine who died in a fire. He was in the sauna in a house that burned down, so he had no idea anything was going on. It was very sad.

The author O. Henry taught me about the value of the unexpected. He once wrote about the noise of flowers and the smell of birds – the birds were chickens and the flowers dried sunflowers rattling against a wall.

But I would like to think that it’s the actor that makes the difference in these cases. Not the director, not the guy that wrote the book, not the guy that adapted it for the screen, but the actor.

We became the songs we wrote.

I was headed in the wrong direction. I didn’t think I’d make it to 21. My Uncle Chuck saved my life. He was a graphic designer, and he gave me my first sketchbook. In the front, he wrote, ‘Wear it like your underwear.’

I was really inspired while I was pregnant and I wrote a whole album for my baby. I wanted to write a kids album that didn’t annoy parents. I used The Beatles ‘Rocky Raccoon’ as sort of a starting place for my writing.

I once had a crush on one of my teachers. I wrote him a love letter and stuck it in a bag in his office. I didn’t write my name on it, but I’m sure he figured out it was me.

I do not mind having written the song at all. I just wish that I had written it in a different key, as the high d is hard to play. I am glad that I wrote something that brought joy to millions of people.

They had always told me that I wrote like a man.

And that’s why I wrote the book, because our country really needs to understand, if people in this nation understood what our foreign policy is really about, what foreign aid is about, how our corporations work, where our tax money goes, I know we will demand change.

My scripts, they’re pretty serious. I basically just describe stuff. I don’t put too many notes and letters to the editors. But when I wrote ‘KGBLT,’ in parentheses I wrote, ‘Well this is the best thing I’ve ever written. It will all be downhill from here. I’m so sorry for the rest of my career.’

I was asked by a group to write a song on the theme of brotherhood. This was before women’s liberation, when brotherhood meant men and women both, so I wrote the song. Since I had always been very fond of the Passion Chorale, I wrote words to that great piece.

I wrote my epitaph: He started out a particle and ended up a wave.

I have 800 books of just Samuel Beckett’s work, tons of his correspondence, personal letters that he wrote. I have copies of plays he used when he directed, so all of his handwritten notes are in the corners of the page.

‘Halo’ I wrote with my grandpa in his nursing home. When I went to visit him, he’d often comment on my halo. But of course, I couldn’t see. And he always – he had pictures of Jesus with these beautiful halos. And so I asked him if he’d write a song with me about Jesus’ halo.

I don’t know where Bush is going – yet. But, Sharon obviously – I wrote somewhere in the last several months, that Sharon has adopted, essentially, the position of the Labor Party: that the Palestinians are here to stay.

I didn’t have any desire I might have had 10 years ago to shoot every single word that I wrote.

If I don’t relate to a song, I won’t sing it. The thing is that if I wrote it, I’m always going to relate to it.

I was well traveled, and I created this illusion of literacy through reading and writing. I wrote a book of short stories.

So I’ll write it, and then I’ll find out that I actually wrote something that is utterly useless. You can’t use it in the story and it doesn’t fit. So I just throw it away. I’ve done that countless times.

I didn’t think anything I wrote was going to get published. I’m a dyslexic kid who had tutors through college. But I had a very strong impulse to write.

Christ himself wrote nothing, but furnished endless material for books and songs of gratitude and praise.

I only published my first novel at the age of 40. Till then, I wrote short stories.

As an adolescent I wrote comic books, because I read lots of them, and fantasy novels set in Malaysia and Central Africa.

I’ve always romanticized the late ’40s and ’50s – the cars, jazz, the open roads and lack of pollution. Now there are more vehicles, less hitchhikers, more billboards and power lines and stuff. People wrote wonderful long letters that took months to receive, and now everything is email.

I don’t think I wrote my first song until I was 25. And then everything I wrote ended up becoming my first album. I put my music online, and from that, things just happened.

It’s just that what’s important there is different there than what’s important is here. Here, people care that you wrote a book or that you work in the media.

I wrote and produced millions and millions of selling records, so my publishing company alone was worth millions of dollars. I didn’t have to work anymore in life because when the rappers started sampling… I’m the most sampled artist in history.

As soon as I began, it seemed impossible to write fast enough – I wrote faster than I would write a letter – two thousand to three thousand words in a morning, and I cannot help it.

I wrote a great deal… but very little of any importance; there are not more than four of five papers which I can still remember with some satisfaction.

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.

It was psychobabbler Abraham Maslow who wrote of the phenomena of self-actualization. What Maslow failed to grasp is that reaching true self-actualization can only be ultimately achieved when you have your own brand of ammunition.

I think Shakespeare is really the one. Words as music and music as words. Everything he wrote was good, which is really frightening.

I’ve always said, since I got to know him and wrote about him, that he’s the generation he least appeals to is his own and I think in many ways he was born middle-aged and that’s become apparent in recent years.

I wrote most of these songs right before the end. A lot of these songs are about that. Even if it’s not direct, you can feel the beginning of the end of the breakup in these songs.

I wrote my first report about Madam Walker when I was a senior in high school in 1970.

So, how to stay inside the world of entertainment without actually getting another job? I felt the only logical answer was to become a novelist. So I wrote the first book – driven by some very real feelings of desperation – and it worked.

In my twenties and early thirties, I wrote three novels, but beginning in my late thirties, I wearied of the mechanics of fiction writing, got interested in collage nonfiction, and have been writing literary collage ever since.

And one of the reasons that I wrote the cook books was so that I could be at home more than being on the road.

I just wrote a book, but don’t go out and buy it yet, because I don’t think it’s finished yet.

If I ever wrote a script myself, it would be strongly emotional material.

I never wanted to write. I just wrote letters home from a kibbutz in Israel to reassure my parents that I was still alive and well fed and having a great time. They thought these letters were brilliant and sent them to a newspaper. So I became a writer by accident.

You know, bad poetry I wrote in high school can still be found on the Internet, and, you know, there’s a Web log of our college newspaper. You know, there’s so many different stages of my creative development are sort of on-record if somebody were to choose to look for them.