To try to write a grand cosmical drama leads necessarily to myth. To try to let knowledge substitute ignorance in increasingly larger regions of space and time is science.
I’ve always tended to write songs prolifically.
To write a good song, an artist has to drawn from reality. There has to be some spark from realism that communicates a real feeling to someone else. You have to be real. Or you have to be a really good storyteller.
Let there be no inscription upon my tomb; let no man write my epitaph: no man can write my epitaph.
Most rock journalism is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read.
Don’t try to guess what it is people want and give it to them. Don’t ask for a show of hands. Try your best to write what you like, what you think your friends would like and what you think your father would like and then cross your fingers… The most valuable thing you have is your own voice.
Why do I like to write short stories? Well, I certainly didn’t intend to. I was going to write a novel. And still! I still come up with ideas for novels. And I even start novels. But something happens to them. They break up. I look at what I really want to do with the material, and it never turns out to be a novel.
I have seen incredible bravery from very young guys, the young generation that people write off.
And I’m a slow writer: five, six hundred words is a good day. That’s the reason it took me 20 years to write those million and a half words of the Civil War.
To write about the hijab is to step into a minefield. Even among those who share my cultural and faith background, opinions veer from those who despise it as a symbol of backwardness to those for whom religion begins and ends with that piece of cloth.
To me, art and storytelling serve primal, spiritual functions in my daily life. Whether I’m telling a bedtime story to my kids or trying to mount a movie or write a short story or a novel, I take it very seriously.
On July 26, 1916, I announced to all my friends in America that from now on I resolved to write no more poems in the classical language, and to begin my experiments in writing poetry in the so-called vulgar tongue of the people.
Let no man write my epitaph… When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then shall my character be vindicated, then may my epitaph be written.
He that will write well in any tongue, must follow this counsel of Aristotle, to speak as the common people do, to think as wise men do: and so should every man understand him, and the judgment of wise men allow him.
I write while listening to music, mostly because the world beyond my headphones is too chaotic.
So what do you desire to do? What do you really want to do as a person? You need to stop and document that; write it down; make a plan; and then God says, ‘I’ll direct your steps.’
So, it becomes an exercise in futility if you write something that does not express the film as the director wishes. It’s still their ball game. It’s their show. I think any successful composer learns how to dance around the director’s impulses.
I think the sport of wrestling, which I became involved with at the age of 14… I competed until I was 34, kind of old for a contact sport. I coached the sport until I was 47. I think the discipline of wrestling has given me the discipline I have to write.
If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.
When I write an original story I write about people I know first-hand and situations I’m familiar with. I don’t write stories about the nineteenth century.
Be careful that what you write does not offend anybody or cause problems within the company. The safest approach is to remove all useful information.
Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child.
I write… sonnets… and writing sonnets is boring. You have to find rhymes; you have to write hendecasyllables; so after a while, I get bored and my drawer is overflowing with unfinished short poems.
I have to write a first draft with a fountain pen before I type it up as a second.
It makes me feel wonderful that people still care for me… that I have so many fans among young people, who write to me and tell me I have been an inspiration.
I do tend to take lines from other lines I like, and then write around them.
Drums isn’t my one thing anymore. I love to produce. I love to make tracks, write tracks, produce tracks, and I can’t just sit back as a drummer anymore.
Today’s public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can’t read them either.
If you must speak ill of another, do not speak it, write it in the sand near the water’s edge.
Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.
My website inspired me to create my book club and provides me with a creative outlet where I can write about things that interest me. It’s a platform where I can present ideas or new ventures and get feedback straight from the people who mean the most to me.
I don’t think of myself as an artist. I’m just a guy who can write.
There’s probably a couple someones that are gonna hear the songs and go, ‘I think that might have been about me,’ or, ‘I know it’s about me.’ I do play that pretty close to the vest. I don’t think I’m ever gonna write a song and drop somebody’s name in it.
It’s very hard to teach someone how to write a song if to begin with there’s no creative crop to harvest.
I write about love, but it’s me wanting to be in love. I’ve never been in love. I love my mom, my dad. I want to be in love. I think I have to allow myself to get there. I’m just so in love with music. It’s weird. I’m at a crossroads because I want to be in love.
I find it really easy to write on the bass, because you kind of get straight to the point: you do lyrics and melody without thinking about decorating the song until after you’ve finished it.
If I ask you to write down the last 4 digits of your social security number, and then take you out to lunch and ask you how many dentists there are in Manhattan, there’s going to be a high correlation between those two numbers. What happens is that the number psychologically makes you feel confident.
I think what happens is you write how you grew up. And I was born on the prairie, and so everything is kind of spare on the prairie. And so I’m just used to writing in that way. ‘Sarah, Plain and Tall’ was that way. And most of my fiction is. I like writing small pieces. Somehow it just suits me.
Believe me, if anybody has a job and starts at 9, there’s no reason why they can’t get up at 4:30 or five and write for a couple of hours, and give their employers their second-best effort of the day – which is what I did.
I start with a character and a situation, but I don’t know what’s going to happen until I write it. Sometimes things happen that surprise me.
I write because writing is the gift God has given me to help people in the world.
If you wish to be a writer, write.
Comedy is underrepresented in every actor’s life, because it’s so bloody difficult to write.
Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself.
How much energy is wasted in Italy in trying to write the novel that obeys all the rules. The energy might have been useful to provide us with more modest, more genuine things, that had less pretensions: short stories, memoirs, notes, testimonials, or at any rate, books that are open, without a preconceived plan.
There has been a great laziness in my soul. Lots of days I could write songs, but I could also take my $400 and play the slot machines at the riverfront casino.
I think about it as not so much ‘I need to get it out of me,’ it’s not that my thoughts are poison, I just want to write good music.
The right way to enjoy ‘Heavy Rain’ is really to make one thing because it’s going to be your story. It’s going to be unique to you. It’s really the story you decided to write.
When I start to write, I don’t have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come.
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.
People write negatives things, cause they feel that’s what sells. Good news to them, doesn’t sell.
I’m not angry; I write about angry characters. When I’m doing that, I’m happy. Just like when I’m writing about Mickey Sabbath being lustful, I’m not feeling lustful; I’m happy.
When I get moved to write a story, I don’t question the story. I dive right in, and I try to ignore the voices that are chattering away at me: ‘You can’t do that’, ‘You shouldn’t do that’. I just sort of leap and take a chance and go for it.
I love all types of music. Jazz, classical, blues, rock, hip-hop. I often write scripts to instrumentals like a hip-hop artist. Music inspires me to write. It’s either music playing or completely silent. Sometimes distant sound fuels you. In New York there’s always a buzzing beneath you.
I wanted to write a novel that would make others feel the history: the pain and fear that black people have had to live through in order to endure.
I stay way from that area, and there’s only so many songs you can write about love, sex and death.
A drop of water, if it could write out its own history, would explain the universe to us.
