The Writing Life Quotes
Always being myself and my salve, which is life. I’m not lonely, if that’s what it seems like. Always writing things down.
Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.
Dogs and other animals - goats, donkeys, cows, a grumpy rooster - continue to change my writing life.
New songs are why artists go on the road. That's why I go on the road. It's a three-prong play. Writing: You're intrigued. Recording: It brings it to life. And then you want to share it.
Famed value investor Guy Spier has managed to write what is both a gripping memoir and a fascinating study of what it takes to succeed in investing and life. A must read!
It's just a freak of fate that I'm paid to write, not paying to print my own books - but I'd be doing it anyway: it's my life.
My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life.
If I've been accused a number of times of writing plays where the endings are ambivalent, indeed, that's the way I find life.
You write about what you have access to, and I have been fortunate enough to have a front-row seat on the rich and powerful my entire life.
Books, I don't know what you see in them. I can understand a person reading them, but I can't for the life of me see why people have to write them.
I just figured if I'm going to call myself a songwriter throughout my life, then writing for most genres of music is something I should at least attempt.
I love Darius Rucker. He's a true artist, a great songwriter who can play his instrument, sing and write about his life.
The work of a writer, his continuing work, depends for breath of life on a certain privacy of heart.
Writing is the great invention of the world.
Why does everyone think a guy who prefers love to people is missing something in his life?
When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook—a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.
A novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane.
it's been my experience that most writers don't talk about their craft--they just do it
A key to a long, productive writing life is finding ways to support that life, emotionally and existentially.
I have to declare in all candor that no one interested in being published in our time can afford to be so naive as to believe that a book will make it merely because it's good.
So much of reading and writing to me is about being elsewhere, no matter how much I love where I am.
Like to write? Of course, of course I do. I seem to live while I write - it is life, for me.
Harvard meant a lot in my writing life from the beginning, even though I didnt actually do much composition on the spot.
What I need more in my culture and in my life right now is hope, and so I tend to write to that. I'll always end up bending more toward optimism.
I believe that there's a force of life in the universe, and that when we're writing or making music or painting, we're likely to connect with that flow.
I would write about issues and people I met along the way, but not about the process and the life of being on the road.
I was a different person before I started to write. When I realized I could be a songwriter and that people would listen - that was when I started feeling good in my life.
I would say my life experiences are my poetry, whether I'm writing about those actual, factual experiences or not.
For better or worse, most of my writing life has been about people that work behind the scenes. I'm interested in finding extraordinary moments in otherwise normal people.
When you're an artist you're speaking about life, you're talking about your experience here on the planet. So essentially, that's what I do when I'm writing songs.
I feel that my life and therefore my writing accept the possibility of all the mystery. Everything we don't know; everything that can possibly happen.
Working with somebody who has a more interesting life than I do - and getting to take on that life temporarily - is an endlessly interesting way to have the experience of writing memoir.
For me, drawing is a question of death and life. Every day I draw, I write, I do something.
What I write is very personal, but not autobiographical. It's more 'thematically personal' - what's up in my life in terms of themes at the moment.
You can't be a writer and have nothing to write about. You have to have life experiences.
It is simply much easier to infuse life, feeling, and higher truth into a novel than a non-fiction work, to find the license to write truth without being wedded to fact.
when I talk about a writing life, I'm talking about a life in which writing is the dominant response to living.
One of the most productive times in my early writing life was while I had a full-time job as a word processor in a law firm and also worked part-time at night, often working until 11:00 P.M.
There's always things that you know about that nobody else, because everybody's life is different. So you write about what you know. That's number one.
In reading and writing, you cannot lay down rules until you have learnt to obey them. Much more so in life.
But that isn't my life. I have said many times I don't want to be considered one who once flew fighters. That's not who I am. I devoted the subsequent 50 years - more - to writing.
You want to make a representative selection, but at the same time, you want to give a sense of the whole project. I have this big conflict in my writing life that I'm trying to work out all the time.
Through therapy and a lot of thinking and writing my memoirs, I've been able to use my life as a lesson.