In this post, you will find great Write Quotes from famous people, such as Malcolm Arnold, Tom Robbins, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Andrea Hirata, Jeanette Winterson. You can learn and implement many lessons from these quotes.
An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.
If you continually write and read yourself as a fiction, you can change what’s crushing you.
I think that I have every right to write a book. I think I’m interesting. I have perspective about me.
Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
I’m not a great deductive thinker, but I will admit to having competence in a very wide range of things – not being afraid to try to write about baseball, choral music and dinosaurs in the same week and see connections among them.
I keep trying to write happy endings, but my books always end on more of a bittersweet note of ambiguity.
To write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write.
I don’t listen to anything when I’m writing. I need total quiet, which is astounding, given that I spent years working for a newspaper and having to write features surrounded by ringing phones and people shouting.
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.
I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.
We need to not write off vaping as a safe alternative to smoking. It’s not safe.
Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.
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 don’t write; I just go in the booth.
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 always write the script by myself.
I tend to write about my anxieties – it’s what I’m afraid will happen. And I write a story working it out.
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.
Well, as a songwriter, it’s really dangerous to use the word love in a song. It’s a word that has been used in songs so many millions of times before, and it’s the most popular topic to ever write about.
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.
Write something, even if it’s just a suicide note.
If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.
I’ve learned any fool can write a bad ad, but it takes a real genius to keep his hands off a good one.
You don’t write a book to show off.
I like to write film music that stands on its own.
The thing I always default to is that I’ll always be here to write songs.
‘Supermodel‘ was a hard record for me; it was an emotional record to write. I was purging a lot of stuff with that album, and I think the one thing I didn’t really consider, that I’d be supporting it for two years and living in that state of mind every night.
I don’t think anyone should write their autobiography until after they’re dead.
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 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.
If you’re nice to me I’ll never write anything bad about you.
I think I’m always subconsciously trying to write the ideal school play. Lots of parts for everybody, great parts for women – don’t forget, more girls try out than boys in the school play; everyone gets to be in the school play.
To me, it’s all about the song. Songs are what make me excited. You hear a great song and you want to record it or get a great idea and you want to write it.
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.
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.
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.
You have to write what you know.
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.
When asked, ‘How do you write?’ I invariably answer, ‘one word at a time.’
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.
Write what you like; there is no other rule.
I want to do public speaking and cause campaigning. I want to write a book.
No one ever gets to write their ending, write their final script.
If you make your living writing, and you can’t write anything, it’s over. It’s very frightening.
I don’t set out to write something. I more just write, and later on, I discover what it’s about.
It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.
Be careful that you do not write or paint anything that is not your own, that you don’t know in your own soul.
The main thing is to make history, not to write it.
There is that lovely feeling of one reader telling another, ‘You must read this.’ I’ve always wanted to write a book like that, with the sense that you are contributing to the discourse in middle America, a discourse that begins at a book club in a living room, but then spreads. That is meaningful to me.
I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
A poet could write volumes about diners, because they’re so beautiful. They’re brightly lit, with chrome and booths and Naugahyde and great waitresses. Now, it might not be so great in the health department, but I think diner food is really worth experiencing periodically.
All my films are statements, especially when I write them.
I feel more comfortable each time I sit down to write, but I’m determined to get better and better.
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.
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 can read and write in Hindi.
If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.
Most rock journalism is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read.
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.
The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.
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.
Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.
But the ultimate lesson is just sit down and write. That’s all.
Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.
Life is God’s novel. Let him write it.
When I start to write, I don’t have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come.
What can a pencil do for all of us? Amazing things. It can write transcendent poetry, uplifting music, or life-changing equations; it can sketch the future, give life to untold beauty, and communicate the full-force of our love and aspirations.
Graphic novels are not traditional literature, but that does not mean they are second-rate. Images are a way of writing. When you have the talent to be able to write and to draw, it seems a shame to choose one. I think it’s better to do both.
Coding is like writing, and we live in a time of the new industrial revolution. What’s happened is that maybe everybody knows how to use computers, like they know how to read, but they don’t know how to write.
Any artist picks and chooses what they want to paint or write about or say. Photographers are the same.
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 about my feelings, things that happen in my life and experiences.
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 write from my stomach.
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.
Mrs. Miniver was an ordinary middle-class English housewife, a character created by Jan Struther when she was commissioned by the ‘Times of London‘ to write a weekly ‘cheer-up’ article in 1937.
I’m a composer. I know nothing about money and commercial stuff. I just write music.
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.
‘E.T.’ began with me trying to write a story about my parents’ divorce.
I’m not afraid to write my feelings in songs.
If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, you must be the one to write it.
I think everyone mentions Bob Dylan, but he’s someone I just admire so much as a songwriter. I think people write songs, and then there’s Bob Dylan songs. He’s one step ahead of just everybody else.
History should not be left to the historians. Rather, be like Churchill. Make history, and then write it.
In the beginning, I was a stay-at-home dad. So I could actually focus on being a rapper. I could write. I could come up with ideas.
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 pen is an instrument of discovery rather than just a recording implement. If you write a letter of resignation or something with an agenda, you’re simply using a pen to record what you have thought out.
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.
If Russians knew how to read, they would write me off.
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.
I’d like to write the way Matisse paints.
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.
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.
I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.
I do not write, I build.
A very wise author once said that a writer writes for himself, and then publishes for money. I write for myself and publish just for the reader.
Life is denied by lack of attention, whether it be to cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece.
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.
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.
Always speak the truth, think before you speak, and write it down afterwards.
I refuse to confide and don’t like it when people write about art.
I can write anywhere. I write in airports. I write on airplanes. I’ve written in the back seats of taxis. I write in hotel rooms. I love hotel rooms. I just write wherever I am whenever I need to write.
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.
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.
Life’s like a movie, write your own ending. Keep believing, keep pretending.
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.
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 don’t understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It’s very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.
I feel like I write so that people can think of it as theirs. If my song is exactly about your life right now, then it is – I don’t even want to say that it’s mine, because it’s yours.
I have an ambition to write a great book, but that’s really a competition with myself. I’ve noticed that a lot of young writers, people in all media, want to be famous but they don’t really want to do anything. I can’t think of anything less worth striving for than fame.
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?
Full-blooded romantic love I wouldn’t be able to write about.
We need men with moral courage to speak and write their real thoughts, and to stand by their convictions, even to the very death.
I love movies, but I would love to write as many graphic novels as people would read from me.
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.
Every time I write a song my approach changes.
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.
It’s hard to be in the limelight and write songs that cater to fans that have expectations of you. We just want to write songs that we love, but all the different people with different ideas coming in make it difficult. We have to ask ourselves if we’re writing for the most important people: the fans.
I believe writing is where it all begins; you can not make a film look different, you have to write it differently.
The heart and soul of good writing is research; you should write not what you know but what you can find out about.
If you wish to be a writer, write.
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.
To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.
You can write anything that you would be able to write on a server and put it onto the blockchain. Instead of Javascript making calls to the server, you would be making calls to the blockchain.
I must not write a word to you about politics, because you are a woman.
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 write essays to clear my mind. I write fiction to open my heart.
I have to be inspired to write a song.
I am sure of this: that no one can write a book which children will like unless he write it for himself first.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
As long as I don’t write about the government, religion, politics, and other institutions, I am free to print anything.
Esoteric or inner knowledge is no different from other kinds of human knowledge and ability. It is a mystery for the average person only to the extent that writing is a mystery for those who have not yet learned to write.
I stay way from that area, and there’s only so many songs you can write about love, sex and death.
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.
What I’m trying to do is to write a story. If you take something from it, that’s wonderful; if you don’t, that’s wonderful as well.
Half a century ago, the amazing courage of Rosa Parks, the visionary leadership of Martin Luther King, and the inspirational actions of the civil rights movement led politicians to write equality into the law and make real the promise of America for all her citizens.
For a male artist, people instantly assume they write their own music, but for women, they assume it’s all manufactured.
Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself.
It just happens I write fast and always have done.
I think anything that’s creative really takes my mind off whatever it is that I’m going through in my life. If you’re going through heartbreak, and you can write a song, it’s a wonderful win-win, because it takes your mind off the heartbreak, and you get to vent.
History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.
That’s the secret to anything we write. You have to bring your experience to it. Otherwise, how do you expect anyone else to connect to it?
My darlings, if I can’t write dark, epic music, I can’t live!
Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.
I’m still in love with what I do, with the idea of making things up, so hours when I write always feel like very blessed hours to me.
Sometimes, I write ’60s or ’80s style pop songs.
My grandfather used to write one sentence every day in his journal: ‘I love Anne more than ever today.’ I think that was his meditation – keeping him in his marriage, and also his appreciation for it. It was very touching.
If I wish to compose or write or pray or preach well, I must be angry. Then all the blood in my veins is stirred, and my understanding is sharpened.
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.
To write the lives of the great in separating them from their works necessarily ends by above all stressing their pettiness, because it is in their work that they have put the best of themselves.
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.
Even if you only want to write science fiction, you should also read mysteries, poetry, mainstream literature, history, biography, philosophy, and science.
Write in recollection and amazement for yourself.
Whenever I write anything, I do sing to it, to try and make sure it’s interesting or compelling to sing to. I’ve gotten in the habit of sharing that with other, more charismatic vocalists.
While I write this letter, I have a pistol in one hand and a sword in the other.
With love, there are so many layers to it that you can write all day about it. It’s not just heartbreak or falling in love; there’s so many different ways to look at it.
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 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 have no ambitions at all! I have none… seriously. I want to be a good father. I want to be a good husband. I want to be a good son, a good brother, a good family member. I don’t have any ambition to direct a film or write a play. I like acting.
On a good day I write, all day.
I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again – as I always am when I write.
I write poetry on my iPhone. I’ve got about 100 poems on there.
I don’t think you can tell the objective truth about a person. That’s why people write novels.
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.
It really fascinates me what white people are allowed to write about.
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.
Write to be understood, speak to be heard, read to grow.
Starting a new job can be nerve-racking , but it’s also exciting. You’re embarking on a new future, positioning yourself to write a fresh story on a clean slate.
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.
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.
The more I draw and write, the more I realise that accidents are a necessary part of any creative act, much more so than logic or wisdom. Sometimes a mistake is the only way of arriving at an original concept, and the history of successful inventions is full of mishaps, serendipity and unintended results.
I think segregation is bad, I think it’s wrong, it’s immoral. I’d fight against it with every breath in my body, but you don’t need to sit next to a white person to learn how to read and write. The NAACP needs to say that.
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.
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.
If ever I was feeling down I would go and write something. It’s a form of escape.
Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.
Never write an advertisement which you wouldn’t want your family to read. You wouldn’t tell lies to your own wife. Don’t tell them to mine.
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.
Be polite; write diplomatically; even in a declaration of war one observes the rules of politeness.
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’ve always tended to write songs prolifically.
There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write.
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.
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.
Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.
I find it very satisfying to write because you can purge many things and vent what you feel under the mask of fiction.
If you must speak ill of another, do not speak it, write it in the sand near the water’s edge.
Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.
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.
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.
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.
The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.
I vividly remember my sixth-grade classroom. I remember what it smelled like, where I sat, what I could see out the window, and how I felt about things. Peel away my decrepit middle-aged exterior, and an important part of me is still twelve years old. It helps me when I sit down to write stories for kids.
You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.
I could not write about ‘ordinary people‘ because I am not in the least interested in them.
A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.
I myself never make any notes. Usually, if I write something down, I can’t read it afterwards.
I have suffered most of the things I write about – or my friends have.
I write music. I’m in a band.
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 moment I write out a cheque, it’s an asset I have written off.
If you can’t sit in a cafe quietly and be ignored, how can you observe human nature and write a story?
My job in space will be to observe and write a journal. I am also going to be teaching a class for students on earth about life in space and on the space shuttle and conducting experiments.
Talent is like a faucet, while it is open, one must write.
I remember thinking during those times that I wanted to write in a way where there are no rules.
It’s still scary every time I go back to the past. Each morning, my heart catches. When I get there, I remember how the light was, where the draft was coming from, what odors were in the air. When I write, I get all the weeping out.
The only real reason to write professionally is that you love it enough.
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.
I don’t write for children. I write and someone says it’s for children.
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.
Is the modern social pattern of unending change and movement the cause of two modern diseases, insecurity and dissatisfaction? How lucky Thomas Hood was to be able to write, ‘I remember, I remember the house where I was born.’ I don’t even know what mine looked like!
Only truthful hands write true poems. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem.
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 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.
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.
A good writer should be able to write comedic work that made you laugh, and scary stuff that made you scared, and fantasy or science fiction that imbued you with a sense of wonder, and mainstream journalism that gave you clear and concise information in a way that you wanted it.
It’s easier to write about Socrates than about a young woman or a cook.
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’ve been doing nineteen hours a day on London, nothing else, I mean this has been my whole life, and writing has been put on one side, and if I’m privileged enough to be the Mayor of this city, then I will not write again.
People would tell me, especially after my marriage to Prince, ‘You need to write a book because you’ve had a crazy life.’
We try to write things that can be interpreted on lots of different levels. There’s not a right way or a wrong way… people can adventure a little.
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 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.
Well, all the plays that I was trying to write were plays that would grab an audience by the throat and not release them, rather than presenting an emotion which you could observe and walk away from.
I don’t think of myself as an artist. I’m just a guy who can write.
If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.
I think, after ‘Let Her Go,’ I wanted to show people that I don’t just write really sad love songs about my ex-girlfriend: that there’s another side to Passenger as well that’s a bit more up-tempo and more inclined to social commentary.
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.’
I write for myself things that I’ve gone through.
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.
On the ‘Star,’ you were forced to learn to write a simple declarative sentence. This is useful to anyone. Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and could help him if he gets out of it in time.
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.
Why do I write? I have been called a writer of catastrophes, but that isn’t true. I am always looking for words of love. Hate will not save us. Only love.
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.
I write for the same reason I breathe – because if I didn’t, I would die.
You might not write well every day, but you can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.
I have rituals for cleaning out resentments, disappointments, heartbreak, depression and for work. One of the things I do is go over old stuff if I have been unable to write for a while.
Write out the story – rapidly, fluently, and not too critically – following the second or narrative-order synopsis. Change incidents and plot whenever the developing process seems to suggest such change, never being bound by any previous design.
My friend Akshay Upadhyay and I used to write poetry and read out to each other.
I write from my soul. This is the reason that critics don’t hurt me, because it is me. If it was not me, if I was pretending to be someone else, then this could unbalance my world, but I know who I am.
I have to write a first draft with a fountain pen before I type it up as a second.
Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.
I’m very open and never write what I’m going to say. Speeches bore everybody else. I have to freestyle. Every time, from one program to another, everything changes and I improvise.
I don’t write songs about a specific, elusive thing. I write about love, and everyone knows what it is like to have your heart broken.
Love songs are the most complex to write because everyone knows about it.
We write about ourselves because we know about ourselves.
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 write most of my songs when I’m in a bad mood.
I write in American slang.
One of the disadvantages of poetry over popular music is that if you write a pop song, it naturally gets into people’s heads as they listen in the car. You don’t have to memorize a Paul Simon song; it’s just in your head, and you can sing along. With a poem, you have to will yourself to memorize it.
I definitely dislike pomposity and artifice. I hope that I’m not that. Once I write a song, it belongs to the world, and the way people perceive it, it’s cool.
Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.
It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.
We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.
A lot of times, somebody will say something and it will give you a good title. So you carry a pencil with you and jot that down. You don’t just write a song right quick, though. You fool around and work with it. You have to keep going over and over it and see if you can’t write a song that means something.
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 in a diary every night to collect my thoughts. It’s very therapeutic to songwrite, because it’s the same thing.
If you can write DNA, you’re no longer limited to ‘what is’ but to what you could make.
The easiest thing to do on earth is not write.
Pain’s always been the root of my music. I just write what I feel.
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.
I can write a poem in 10 minutes. I like writing songs; I can write songs in 5 or 10 minutes. My concentration seems very short.
Most of my teachers wanted to send me to the principal‘s office. But my fourth-grade teacher once put her arms around me and said, ‘You sure write well.’ And I’ve had good penmanship until this day. She was the only one who ever said anything nice to me. That’s the kind of motivation that students need.
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.
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.
Everything I write is about big feelings. What I care about is trying to be brave enough to feel how you feel and to be emotionally true.
I try to write the books I would love to come upon that are honest, concerned with real lives, human hearts, spiritual transformation, families, secrets, wonder, craziness – and that can make me laugh.
Although I write screenplays, I don’t think I’m a very good writer.
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.
The real middle class India that has always been looking for a voice that is its very own. I write about it because I belong to it.
When I am writing anything in general, I just want to tell the story that exists in my head; I don’t try to write a parable or make a point.
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.
I don’t write polite letters. I don’t like to plea-bargain. I like to fight.
The truth is, it’s easier for me to write than talk… to express the state I’m in at any time.
You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year.
I like writing books. I’d rather be at home with my wife. I can write, take a break, come out, have a glass of tea, give my wife a kiss, and go back in and write some more. It’s not so bad. I am really lucky.
People imagine that there are rituals, like lighting candles or sacrificing chickens. They really just want to know what the magic formula is for writing. I inevitably disappoint them by saying you just put your butt in the chair, and you write 500 words a day, and then you get up and repeat it the next morning.
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.
Find enough clever things to say, and you’re a Prime Minister; write them down and you’re a Shakespeare.
I love pop music. It’s not easy to write a good pop song.
I don’t write for an auditorium full of people. I don’t write for the microphone; I write for the page.
I don’t know the rules of grammar… If you’re trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think. We try to write in the vernacular.
It usually helps me write by reading – somehow the reading gear in your head turns the writing gear.
You almost have to create situations in order to write about them, so I live in a constant state of self-imposed poverty. I don’t want to live any other way.
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.
