Here we have the best Write Quotes from famous authors such as Jack White, Jim Harrison, Pete Townshend, Hans Zimmer, Ross Perot. Find the perfect quotation from our collection.
Action is greater than writing. A good man is a nobler object of contemplation than a great author. There are but two things worth living for: to do what is worthy of being written; and to write what is worthy of being read.
Even if you only want to write science fiction, you should also read mysteries, poetry, mainstream literature, history, biography, philosophy, and science.
Sometimes, I write ’60s or ’80s style pop songs.
Anything that keeps you happy and writing is part of my writing ritual: I like music, so I tend to have it playing in the background. But if I’m interested, I can write in an airport waiting areas.
Whenever I write about mental health and integrative therapies, I am accused of being prejudiced against pharmaceuticals. So let me be clear – integrative medicine is the judicious application of both conventional and evidence-based natural therapies.
I think its so cool that you can pick up the guitar and create something that didn’t exist 5 minutes ago. You can write something that no ones ever heard before. You have music at your fingertips.
Still to this day, I don’t know when I write something whether it’s good or not.
I don’t think of myself as an artist. I’m just a guy who can write.
All my films are statements, especially when I write them.
I felt that I had to write. Even if I had never been published, I knew that I would go on writing, enjoying it and experiencing the challenge.
I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.
Be careful that you do not write or paint anything that is not your own, that you don’t know in your own soul.
We need men with moral courage to speak and write their real thoughts, and to stand by their convictions, even to the very death.
The idea for ‘Conversations with Friends’ – two college students who befriend a married couple – struck me at first as a concept for a short story. I started to write it under the title ‘Melissa,’ and eventually, it got too long.
It wasn’t books that inspired me to write. For me, inspiration was simple, immediate: I got it from eating, dancing, talking. I got it from life lived, things touched, from sensuality, from love of life, from our irrefutable connection to the earth.
The main thing is to make history, not to write it.
The mind of a 19-year-old is very different from the mind of a 26-year-old. You grow. You get into better relationships. You experience more, meet more people, better people. But when you’re in a dark hole at an earlier point in your life – you write about the mindset you’re in at that moment.
I write fiction and I’m told it’s autobiography, I write autobiography and I’m told it’s fiction, so since I’m so dim and they’re so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn’t.
Although I write screenplays, I don’t think I’m a very good writer.
There was a recording studio in my school, and I knew this kid who had a key, so I’d write lyrics in school while I was in class, and then, in a 10-minute break, I recorded the song ‘Hurt’ in one go at the school studio.
It’s been a very strange trajectory because I struggled for so many years. I mean, I was doing these videos, I was doing these live shows, I had a lot of fans in New York, the press would write about me, but I couldn’t get a paying job, and so my father and I were really like a team.
‘The One-Eyed Man’ is a novel that was one I never intended to write.
We need to not write off vaping as a safe alternative to smoking. It’s not safe.
As far as I know, if you take your time, write a good script and make a good film, then give the audience time, they will accept it.
A poet ought not to pick nature‘s pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory.
I don’t write for children. I write and someone says it’s for children.
To write regular verses destroys an infinite number of fine possibilities, but at the same time it suggests a multitude of distant and totally unexpected thoughts.
My darlings, if I can’t write dark, epic music, I can’t live!
Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.
An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.
The subjects I wanted to write about – the mystery of the human soul, evil – didn’t interest newspapers, and news reporting bored me.
When I write about Mickey Haller as the Lincoln lawyer, I totally see Matthew McConaughey because he took that character when that character was still fairly new to me – only two or three years old – when I knew McConaughey was going to play him. He’s also the same age, the right age, in comparison to the book.
The easiest thing to do on earth is not write.
I didn’t do anything but write for six months after I got my publishing deal. That was just trying to get better and figure out my sound and the way I like to do it.
When you die, others who think they know you, will concoct things about you… Better pick up a pen and write it yourself, for you know yourself best.
I’ve always tended to write songs prolifically.
I think private school is much better at customer service and making the parents feel better, especially in Los Angeles. It’s almost like a spa for the parents where you drop your kids off, where they give you a beautifully baked thing and let the parents write their own newsletter about global warming.
I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
I wanted to be the first girl in my class to get married. From the seventh grade on, I used to write in my yearbook under each senior‘s picture, ‘married’ or ‘engaged.’ I had marriage on the brain.
A person who can write a long letter with ease, cannot write ill.
I think there is only one way to write fiction – alone, in a room, without interruption or any distraction.
It came about as follows: over the years when I was involved in dianetics, I wrote the beginnings of many stories. I would get an idea, and then write the beginning, and then never touch it again.
Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself.
It is difficult not to write satire.
I write from my life, my experience. I’m selfish that way.
I don’t like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can’t do it.
I’ve always measured a good day as one where I can read, write, and run.
Well, I think every film student goes into film school thinking they want to write and direct their own movies, and they don’t realize how much goes into it, and what a process it is.
For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible.
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.
Write your own stories.
Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.
And they write innumerable books; being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation, and dodging his emptiness.
I was lucky because my mum was a teacher and showed me how to read and write. But most importantly, she encouraged me to use my imagination.
I loved writing lyrics for rap when I was in junior high. I loved studying, but somehow I wanted to be a rapper who can write and rap.
When I create lyrics, I just go off of energy. Sometimes I write down my lyrics on my phone and most times I remember the lyrics in my head.
Political consequences have never really come into my thinking. I didn’t think about it when we made ‘Maurice’ or when I said first I would co-direct and then write the screenplay of ‘Call Me’. I was just making something I thought I would enjoy creating.
I write for all the peoples of all the world.
They are just really stupid people in Hollywood. You write them a script, and they say they love it, they absolutely love it. Then they say, ‘But doesn’t it need a small dog, and an Eskimo, and shouldn’t it be set in New Guinea?’ And you say, ‘But it is a sophisticated romantic comedy set in Paris.’
I write songs about stuff that I can’t really get past personally – and then I write a song about it and I feel better.
Life is denied by lack of attention, whether it be to cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece.
I write the occasional poem. I think my dabbling in poetry makes me better at screenplays. Poetry teaches the value of condensing, the importance of talking in a few words.
Every time I think I know what’s right and wrong, I end up being wrong. All I want to do is explore. I want to see what people would do. I say, ‘What would this person do in this situation?’ and I write it down. I’m not writing manifestos of my political views.
Normally, I just sit in my quiet little room and do the small things that bring me pleasures. I read my books, I answer email, I write a little bit.
Love is the answer to everything. It’s the only reason to do anything. If you don’t write stories you love, you’ll never make it. If you don’t write stories that other people love, you’ll never make it.
The starting point of discovering who you are, your gifts, your talents, your dreams, is being comfortable with yourself. Spend time alone. Write in a journal. Take long walks in the woods.
I write because writing is the gift God has given me to help people in the world.
I could go right now and work for a non-profit organization, but I have a passion for sports, and I love to write and speak.
But, I don’t think any arranger should ever write a drum part for a drummer because if a drummer can’t create his own Interpretation of the chart and he plays everything that’s written, he becomes mechanical; he has no freedom.
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.
Some critics will write ‘Maya Angelou is a natural writer’ – which is right after being a natural heart surgeon.
I never have my CNN off, it’s on the whole day. I don’t want to be out of range of television. I’m constantly bombarded by information – Somalia one second, Haiti the next – I need that constant pounding. I couldn’t write without television. I need to have the world in my room.
I write in Urdu and everything is written by my hand.
In real life, I am emotionally confused, which enables me to write songs. I’m a Pisces, and they say that Pisces are very sensitive. If men were just honest with themselves, they would see that they all have that side.
I write to understand as much as to be understood.
What’s that line from TS Eliot? To arrive at the place where you started, but to know it for the first time. I’m able to write about a breakup from a different place. Same brokenness. Same rock-bottom. But a little more informed, now I’m older. Thank God for growing up.
I became a script writer with absolutely no idea of how to write a script whatsoever. I still feel a bit of an outsider in that regard. If I can maintain that approach to screenwriting, it can continue to be enjoyable.
I’d like to write the way Matisse paints.
If you continually write and read yourself as a fiction, you can change what’s crushing you.
It was my 16th birthday – my mom and dad gave me my Goya classical guitar that day. I sat down, wrote this song, and I just knew that that was the only thing I could ever really do – write songs and sing them to people.
I tell you, gospel music is very uplifting. It’s great. It’s just a lot of fun to write, and it’s wonderful for the heart, soul, mind, and spirit. It’s just great.
Lovers who love truly do not write down their happiness.
Life’s like a movie, write your own ending. Keep believing, keep pretending.
You don’t write a book to show off.
I want to write. I want to direct. I want to produce – I want to inhabit what I think it means to fully be an artist.
I came from anonymity, and I will continue to write as a private pursuit.
Don’t pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches.
Never regret what you don’t write.
Talent is like a faucet, while it is open, one must write.
My first influences for playing were Johnny Ramone and Jimmy Page, the same as everybody else. Joe Perry. The guys in Alice Cooper‘s band, whatever their names were. Mick Ronson from David Bowie. You know who really influenced me to write songs? Iron Maiden.
I think that I have every right to write a book. I think I’m interesting. I have perspective about me.
If you’re nice to me I’ll never write anything bad about you.
A lot of the songs I’ve recorded are songs I write.
I know a lot of artists say this, but it’s hard to put myself in a box. I just write songs that I strongly believe in and that are coming form a special place. There’s no tricks.
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.
I write from my stomach.
Texting is fingered speech. Now we can write the way we talk.
You write your life story by the choices you make. You never know if they have been a mistake. Those moments of decision are so difficult.
If you want to be a professional writer then you need to write consistently. Inspiration strikes about once every blue moon which, for me, is once every two and a half to three months, which is when I’ll get really and truly inspired about something.
I write and rewrite and rewrite and write and like to turn in what I think is finished work.
Full-blooded romantic love I wouldn’t be able to write about.
Most rock journalism is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read.
I try and write satire that’s well-intentioned. But those intentions have to be hidden. It can’t be completely clear, and that’s what makes it comedy.
Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.
Any play is hard to write, and plays are getting harder and harder to get on the stage.
I feel more comfortable each time I sit down to write, but I’m determined to get better and better.
It seems to me that after the second world war, Beckett finally realized he had something to write about.
In the TV business, you’ve got to write fast, and someone will tell you, ‘Can you rewrite this episode before… 6 P.M.?’ So that’s when you rewrite it. You can’t wait for the muse to show up.
I want to do public speaking and cause campaigning. I want to write a book.
If you were to say to me that I couldn’t paint, I would write. If I couldn’t write, I would be a set designer. As long as I’m creating something, I’m happy.
There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write.
Usually when I write a script, I have in mind some real people that I’m writing about, who don’t always act in the film afterward.
I don’t feel I write fast. I write in longhand and do so much revision. On the page, it’s so old-fashioned. I could write a whole novel on scrap paper, scribbles and things. I keep looking at it and something develops. For me, using a word processor would mean staring at a screen for too many hours.
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.
When I create a TV show, it’s so that I can write it. I’m not an empire builder; my writing staff is usually a combination of two kinds of people – experts in the world the show is set in, and young writers who will not be unhappy if they’re not writing scripts.
Write a page a day. It will add up.
I have suffered most of the things I write about – or my friends have.
A lot of the time when I write about the person that I love, I feel like I’m writing about New York.
I have to practice to be good at guitar. I have to write 100 songs before you write the first good one.
It’s a funny thing: people often ask how I discipline myself to write. I can’t begin to understand the question. For me, the discipline is turning off the computer and leaving my desk to do something else.
I always work on the principle that if my heart and my head are together on an issue, write it, say it.
The thing I always default to is that I’ll always be here to write songs.
A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.
I think it goes back to my high school days. In computer class, the first assignment was to write a program to print the first 100 Fibonacci numbers. Instead, I wrote a program that would steal passwords of students. My teacher gave me an A.
My life has been a dream. If someone had to write a story about it, it would seem a little unreal. It’s the kind of story I would read and say, ‘Nah, that’s not possible.’
If you feel bored or uncomfortable as you’re writing, ask yourself what’s bothering you and write about that. Sometimes your creative energy is like water in a kinked hose, and before thoughts can flow on the topic at hand, you have to straighten the hose by attending to whatever is preoccupying you.
I would say a good leader brings results. A great leader writes a new story, it’s different. Obviously a new story has to incorporate a lot of results. But a story is a chapter in the life of a company that people want to write and want to remember.
I think if everyone would write down the funny stories from their own childhoods, the world would be a better place.
I put a lot of myself into my characters when I write.
I’m probably only going to make 10 movies, so I’m already planning on what I’m going to do after that. That’s why I’m counting them. I have two more left. I want to stop at a certain point. What I want to do, basically, is I want to write novels, and I want to write theatre, and I want to direct theatre.
What I am going to write is the last of what I have to say. I will say that literature is the only consciousness we possess and that its role as consciousness must inform us of our ability to comprehend the hideous danger of nuclear power.
Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.
I’ve always wanted to assist Gautham. I’m happy that I actually got an opportunity to write for him. It’s a dream come true to be associated with him.
I always try to write a song, I never just want to write a record.
The way we write our solo songs is that we take the emotions that we feel and put them in the lyrics. And we try to put them in the songs.
I believe, 50 years from now, when you write history, one technology that would have changed human civilization is going to be the mobile Internet.
It really fascinates me what white people are allowed to write about.
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.
I can read and write in Hindi.
I pay attention to lyrics and I know what rap fans care about. I try to write for the average listener and I’m conscious of the mainstream without selling out.
I write essays to clear my mind. I write fiction to open my heart.
You might not write well every day, but you can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.
Respect the language in which you write. Be kind, develop good vocabulary, and be creative in writing beautiful sentences. Your prose should be your poetry when you write.
People take the longest possible paths, digress to numerous dead ends, and make all kinds of mistakes. Then historians come along and write summaries of this messy, nonlinear process and make it appear like a simple, straight line.
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.
We write about ourselves because we know about ourselves.
It’s a weird thing. Rick Springfield wrote ‘Jessie’s Girl,’ and he probably gets sick of talking about ‘Jessie’s Girl.’ The thing is, I didn’t write ‘Blurred Lines.’ I didn’t direct the music video. I’m really happy for the success, but it is kind of a funny thing to follow me around.
I don’t care who you are. When you sit down to write the first page of your screenplay, in your head, you’re also writing your Oscar acceptance speech.
Love songs are the most complex to write because everyone knows about it.
I’m more comfortable writing traditional protagonists. But ‘Steve Jobs‘ and ‘The Social Network‘ have antiheroes. I like to write antiheroes as if they’re making their case to God about why they should be allowed into heaven. I have to find something in that character that is like me and write to that.
A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.
I don’t really have a writing process. I don’t write at all but, honestly, I feel like it’s a modern-day writing because everything is technology and if I go in there and freestyle and I keep it, I feel like I wrote that. If I go in there and fix it, it’s almost like something I wrote.
When people write comedy from neutrality, it just gets kind of silly.
I have to be inspired to write a song.
As long as I don’t write about the government, religion, politics, and other institutions, I am free to print anything.
I’m a believer. I don’t go to church. I don’t belong to any particular religion, but I do believe in God. I couldn’t write what I write about and be creative without a certain form of belief.
I must never write when I do not want to write.
Write in such a way as that you can be readily understood by both the young and the old, by men as well as women, even by children.
When I write songs, when I sing songs, I don’t have anybody in mind. I’m just trying to express what I think people are feeling.
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.
History should not be left to the historians. Rather, be like Churchill. Make history, and then write it.
Morocco is such a beautiful place. It’s incredibly beautiful. And also it is captivating place because for a writer, you feel that you make impact. I mean, when I write something in the press, the day after in the fish market, people will be discussing it.
I was just on the edge of getting married, and I was frenzied at the prospect of this great step in my life after having been a bachelor for so long. And I really wanted to take my mind off of the agony, and so I decided to sit down and write a book.
You philosophers are lucky men. You write on paper and paper is patient. Unfortunate Empress that I am, I write on the susceptible skins of living beings.
I don’t think it is an easy thing to write and expect to be commercial, even if you are from Venus and a hermaphrodite.
The single best piece of advice I give to aspiring writers is to always write about things that they know. I suggest that they write about people and places and events and conflicts they are familiar with. That way their writing will be real and hopefully readers will respond to it. I try to take my own advice.
You have to write what you know.
I really hate to write.
At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read and the way I write. Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.
I can’t write without a reader. It’s precisely like a kiss – you can’t do it alone.
The turning point was when I hit my 30th birthday. I thought, if really want to write, it’s time to start. I picked up the book How to Write a Novel in 90 Days. The author said to just write three pages a day, and I figured, I can do this. I never got past Page 3 of that book.
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
I can write a song in about an hour if it’s a simple country song.
If I write when I’m low, it will be a dark song, but I don’t care. I want to be honest with myself at all times.
Write what you like; there is no other rule.
I don’t listen to what people say about me and I don’t read what they write about me. People can compare me to anyone they want to, but I’m not going to worry about it.
I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition.
A writer writes. If you want to be a writer, write.
Instead of slashing my wrists, I just write a bunch of really crummy songs.
If we tried to write about politics, you’d realize that we’re all a bunch of idiots.
My goal was, and still is, to write first, direct my own stuff whenever possible and control my own creative destiny.
A mission statement is not something you write overnight… But fundamentally, your mission statement becomes your constitution, the solid expression of your vision and values. It becomes the criterion by which you measure everything else in your life.
The broken heart on my right finger represents me before I figured out who I was, and the full heart on my left is because I’m left-handed, I use that to write my music, and my music helped me obtain my direction in life.
No matter what you write, you actually can’t help retelling a fairy tale somewhere along the way.
Advertising is a business of words, but advertising agencies are infested with men and women who cannot write. They cannot write advertisements, and they cannot write plans. They are helpless as deaf mutes on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera.
The moment I write out a cheque, it’s an asset I have written off.
I want to have new challenges and write new crazy books because I think it makes me a better writer to be insecure and try new things.
It’s disheartening to write goals from year to year, looking back only to see you are in the same place. You can make so many promises that you get sick of yourself, but what is it that God can’t do?
I’m always asked if the songs that I write are therapeutic, and my answer is a quick no. In fact, it could be argued that they exacerbate my neurosis.
There should be a law that no ordinary newspaper should be allowed to write about art. The harm they do by their foolish and random writing it would be impossible to overestimate – not to the artist, but to the public, blinding them to all but harming the artist not at all.
If you’re going to write about war, which my books are about, wars are nasty things. I think it’s sort of a cheap, easy way out to write a war story in which no one ultimately dies.
If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.
I write in a very strange way. Things are very fragmentary for a very long time, and then they come together very quickly near the end of the process.
People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children’s book. I say, ‘If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children’s book’, but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you’re directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable.
The new year stands before us, like a chapter in a book, waiting to be written. We can help write that story by setting goals.
Sometimes I try to concentrate on the story I would like to write, and I realize that what interests me is something else entirely, or, rather, not anything precise but everything that does not fit in what I ought to write.
When I write something, I want the best director to direct it. And that’s not going to be me. So when David Fincher comes along and wants to direct ‘The Social Network,’ when Bennett Miller comes along and wants to direct ‘Moneyball,’ or when Danny Boyle wants to direct ‘Jobs’? Hallelujah. I want them directing it.
If you can write DNA, you’re no longer limited to ‘what is’ but to what you could make.
For businesses, biomimicry is about bringing a new discipline – biology – to the design table. It’s not to write an environmental impact statement, as most biologists in business do right now.
If I’ve ever regretted anything, it was putting all my eggs in one basket, holing up and kneeling at the altar of literature, instead of going out and at least reviewing, running around and trying to write for magazines. That would’ve been the intelligent thing to do, but I didn’t, and that was because of fanaticism.
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 could not write about ‘ordinary people‘ because I am not in the least interested in them.
I can’t read, I don’t know how to write, my whole life has been one big fight.
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.
I think I am a tough grader, because I feel like it’s my job to teach them to write well. I hope my students say I’m a fair teacher.
I have been commissioned to write an autobiography and I would be grateful to any of your readers who could tell me what I was doing between 1960 and 1974.
I feel like my songs are like diary entries for me. So I usually write about things that have happened to me specifically or sometimes it can be someone who’s close to me.
‘E.T.’ began with me trying to write a story about my parents’ divorce.
Hindi has never been a trouble. In fact, Hindi is the only language I can speak and write apart from Malayalam and English.
The desire to write grows with writing.
The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and to write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money.
Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.
I’m not going to be rockin’ n’ rollin’ when I’m 50 years old. But you can be in your prime on television, compose songs, or write a Broadway play when you’re 50.
Always speak the truth, think before you speak, and write it down afterwards.
I just freestyle. I don’t actually write the words on paper. It’s just whatever comes into my mind. I’ll record three or four lines at a time, get a good take, and do three or four more. It may be whatever comes into my mind. But I care about my craft a lot more than a lot of other people.
Some people act as though art that is for a mass audience is not good art, and I think this has been a very negative thing. I know that I have wanted very much to write books that are accessible to the widest audience possible.
I adopted a motto: Never say no. Jim Morrison never said no, Kurt Cobain never said no. You couldn’t have great things to write about if all you did was sit in your living room with your roommates talking about the phone bill.
Every time I write a song my approach changes.
The only real reason to write professionally is that you love it enough.
When I was taken to the concentration camp of Auschwitz, a manuscript of mine ready for publication was confiscated. Certainly, my deep desire to write this manuscript anew helped me to survive the rigors of the camps I was in.
No one ever gets to write their ending, write their final script.
I was 22 and stopped writing plays, and I didn’t start again until I was 25. I was writing badly. In college, I attempted to write these more conventional plays, but the theater I loved was downtown experimental theater. I didn’t feel like I could do that either. It didn’t occur to me to do my own thing.
All of us learn to write in the second grade. Most of us go on to greater things.
As writers, we are sketching people all the time when we write fiction.
I mean there’s something I have achieved in life, even if it’s little, and if people write about it, then it’s fine.
I do write a lot of children’s songs, and I’m going to do a children’s television show, which also means I’ll be doing a lot of albums. So I do hope my future will hold a lot of things for children.
I don’t write books inadvertently.
Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.
Most artists, you know, you spend their entire lives learning how to play music and write songs, and they don’t really know how the music business works.
I used to work in the cotton fields a lot when I was young. There were a lot of African Americans working out there. A lot of Mexicans – the blacks and the whites and the Mexicans, all out there singing, and it was like an opera in the cotton fields, and I can still hear it in the music that I write and play today.
I always write things that entertain me, and one of the things that I find really enjoyable to explore is the idea of love. I like looking at my own life and my friends and family and how love changes who you are. It fascinates me.
I used to write jokes with friends. We’d pick a topic and then think out loud, brainstorm.
You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.
What I have is a malevolent curiosity. That’s what drives my need to write and what probably leads me to look at things a little askew. I do tend to take a different perspective from most people.
My job is to write opinions. I decide cases and write opinions. It is not to respond to idiocy and critics who make statements that are unfounded. That doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t have constructive criticisms, but it should be constructive.
Never think you can’t do something. I definitely never thought I could write a book, and even after I started writing it, I was like, ‘Oh my God, how am I gonna write a book?’ Just set your sights high and reach for the stars. Go live your dreams, and never think you can’t.
We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.
‘Boyz-n-the-Hood’ was actually supposed to be written for Eazy’s group. He had a group out in New York called Home Boys Only, called HBO. One of them looked like LL Cool J. Eazy wanted to write a song for them, a street song, like what we were doing on the mix tapes. So when I wrote it, it was too West Coast for them.
I don’t write for an auditorium full of people. I don’t write for the microphone; I write for the page.
It’s not how big your pencil is; it’s how you write your name.
My early novels were written in quite a dark place. I stand by them, but I would never write them again. I think it is subversive to embrace emotional optimism, because it goes against the grain.
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.
Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.
I write in the most classical French because this form is necessary for my novels: to translate the murky, floating, unsettling atmosphere I wanted them to have, I had to discipline it into the clearest, most traditional language possible.
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 used to think, ‘How can I write my life story? I’m still living it.’
With ‘New Rose Hotel,’ I knew that I was getting paid a $100,000 fee to write, produce, and direct, and that’s all I was going to get.
When people come to write about my period of office, I would be very happy if they say that I made a contribution to finding the happy medium again for the Germans.
I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.
Anyone can write your own life story.
Even if you have nothing to write, write and say so.
You won’t find me at parties or the openings of movies and I don’t hang around with David Beckham and Kanye West. So the paparazzi leave me alone, which means that I can do my shows, write music and then live a normal life.
I wrote an article on a new Porsche for ‘Automobile Magazine.’ I knew the editor, and she asked me to write this article. So I’m more proud of that than anything.
I think the secret is really observation. Well, if you observe what’s going on and try to figure out how people are thinking, I think you can always write something that people will understand.
I don’t think that women necessarily always write like women. I was a writer on the ‘Comedy Central Roasts’ for a while, and I always wrote the jokes that people assumed the men would write.
My priority is my books, at least at this point. What I have to do is write the narrative of this time.
From Caesar‘s legions to the Napoleonic wars. From the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution to the defeat of nazism. We have helped to write European history, and Europe has helped write ours.
When I was 21, I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for ‘The Simpsons‘ who’d briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life.
I’ve learned any fool can write a bad ad, but it takes a real genius to keep his hands off a good one.
The music helped me sympathize with our young generation and also empathize with them. I’d like to create and write more music that represents them.
I need complete silence when I write.
I won’t say ours was a tough school, but we had our own coroner. We used to write essays like: What I’m going to be if I grow up.
Forget market or publishers or whatever. Just write with fire and joy, and in my own experience, those are the stories of mine people have wanted to read.
A song like ‘Heartbreaker,’ it’s a song about learning – it’s not necessarily a song about heartbreak. It’s more than that. We write those songs to relive how we got over something.
I used to hang out with grandfather all the time because he used to pick me up from school sometimes, or drive me to my mother‘s, so I’d be with my grandfather a lot. I used to watch him write his sermons.
I don’t like to read things that people write about me. I’d rather read what kids have to say about me because it’s not their profession to do that.
If you wish to be a writer, write.
Pain’s always been the root of my music. I just write what I feel.
I’m half-black, half-white, so I basically put it like this: I can fit in anywhere. That’s why I write so many stories from so many different perspectives, because I’ve seen so many.
I’m completely honest with everyone I deal with. I genuinely care about people. I want to see people succeed and be the best that they can be. So, I wanted to write a motivational book about life, love and the pursuit of happiness.
I think when I was younger I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to act, so I played around with a few different ideas. I wasn’t sure whether I might want to write or whether I might want to do something in fashion.
You can write a great country record and still be angry. Who’s angrier than Toby Keith? He’s angrier than the average 10 rappers.
‘The Beatles‘ did whatever they wanted. They were a collection of influences adapted to songs they wanted to write. George Harrison was instrumental in bringing in Indian music. Paul McCartney was a huge Little Richard fan. John Lennon was into minimalist aggressive rock.
I suffer from stage fright, so I blabber on stage and stop midway through my performances. I cannot even write a cheque, as it makes me nervous. Being around people makes me nervous. But I’m very comfortable in front of the camera, and this I realised many films later.
I’m going to write a book, continue acting, continue motivational speaking and just share with people who I am and what I’ve learned in my second chance of life and pass it on to people in their first chance of life.
As a kid, I said, ‘I want to write for movies.’ When I finally had that opportunity it was like I was able to exhale. ‘Wow, I’m finally doing this for real.’
You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or, rather, you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.
I think I’ve got my business notions and my sense for that sort of thing from my dad. My dad never had a chance to go to school. He couldn’t read and write. But he was so smart. He was just one of those people that could just make the most of anything and everything that he had to work with.
I like to write about love and love lost because I feel like there are so many different subcategories of emotions that you can possibly delve into.
To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.
I need some time to write songs and work on my thing, but I’m just living my life and doing family stuff and letting inspiration come when it comes. But I also don’t feel a desperate need to keep pushing myself into people’s faces to stay cool and relevant.
I have always tried to write in a simple way, using down-to-earth and not abstract words.
I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.
Sure, I am funny and have a good sense of humor. Mostly, though, I just tell the truth. The internal dialogue people have in their heads – I just write it.
I may not be poetic but i’d love to write songs that convey my true feelings.
What you write sets the visual style for the film. But you have to compromise your style in your first few films before people let you do what you want to do.
I love writing two narratives! I think concurrent storylines are my favorite way to write a book.
Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.
I don’t have my novel outlined, and I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don’t know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again.
We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans – because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That’s why we paint, that’s why we dare to love someone – because we have the impulse to explain who we are.
It is very, very difficult for a playwright to write a scene in which a young man has his first deep experience of sex with a girl whom he found immensely attractive, is fully satisfied by this event and gets up and blinds a lot of horses.
As I approached my 95th birthday, I was burdened to write a book that addressed the epidemic of ‘easy believism.’ There is a mindset today that if people believe in God and do good works, they are going to Heaven.
Never write on a subject until you have read yourself full of it.
I don’t know how to write love letters.
If you write a book about a bygone period that lies east of the Mississippi River, then it’s a historical novel. If it’s west of the Mississippi, it’s a western, a different category. There’s no sense to it.
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.
Penmanship means a lot to me. I don’t have cursive penmanship, though. I’ve created my own penmanship. It’s very clear. Everyone can read it. I write things down all day long.
I know some people might think it odd – unworthy even – for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people’s poet so I write for the people.
I must not write a word to you about politics, because you are a woman.
I’m just going to write because I cannot help it.
I don’t write beautifully – I just write reports about our condition.
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 would write 100 jokes a day. Most of them were terrible. But I just said, ‘I’ll write more than everybody else, and that’s how I’ll get better.’
Nothing I write ever has a moral. If it seems to a reader that there is one, that is unintentional.
My biggest extravagances are also investments. I have several houses in California, a house in Nashville, an office complex, and I bought the old home place in Tennessee. They are different places for me to write, but I can turn right around and sell them.
I keep trying to write happy endings, but my books always end on more of a bittersweet note of ambiguity.
Any artist picks and chooses what they want to paint or write about or say. Photographers are the same.
You cannot write for children They’re much too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them.
I write to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind – and to work some of those contradictions out for myself.
I don’t think you can tell the objective truth about a person. That’s why people write novels.
It just happens I write fast and always have done.
Part of the problem with America is that letting go of emotions is viewed as a weakness, but it’s my strength. That enabled me to write my songs.
All the songs I write are about human dynamics, whether it’s with girlfriends, boyfriends, or family.
I wanted to write when I was young, but people said it was impossible. Then my parents locked me in a mental institution – they said I was crazy and would never make a living from writing.
Any room where you feel a good vibe is a good place to write.
