The Writing Life Quotes

How are we to write The Russian novel in America As long as life goes so unterribly?

Writing is the only thing in my life that doesn't get easier. It just doesn't.

I write to be truthful in my songs, which is why I wrote what's painfully truthful about my life in my autobiography.

My mom and my sisters were amazing; they always see the good in people. My mom, she doesn't know how to write and read much, but she's one of the most fantastic women I've met in my life.

The real fear isn't rejection, but that there won't be enough time in your life to write all the stories that you have in you.

I take something that happened to me in 1983, and I make it happen to somebody else in 1943. I pick my life apart that way, try to understand it better by writing straight through it.

Every time I write a book, I've probably taken five years off my life.

My mother always told me if you write about life, you will always be in the game. Just don't write songs write life. I decided to take her up on that.

Your life informs your writing.

In the same way, I write some of my more difficult pieces when I'm at very happy stages in my life.

I have learnt through doing interviews throughout my life that the way that somebody can write about something can change entirely how it was meant, or what actually happened.

I wouldn't mind writing a long book which is going to occupy me for the rest of my life.

It's not enough simply to record the way people actually talk. The dialogue must be concentrated, shaped, dramatically moving, in a way that real-life conversation seldom is.

More than anything that's been the thread through my life - the desire to write, the impulse to write. I mean, it's taken me other places, but it was the impulse to write that led me to singing.

Everything in my life affects my writing. There are no separate parts of my life.

Refuse to write your life and you have no life.

Songs are kind of alive, I think; once you finish writing them, that doesn't mean that that's it for the song. It can have its own little life, I think.

I am so territorial, that [from the start] I just felt like whatever I was gonna do I was gonna write it myself, its my personal preference to always be in control of everything I do in life.

I think my parents' lives are worthy of writing about. I don't think my life is particularly worthy of writing about.

While I had cancer, I wrote these twenty-two personal essays about how I lived my life backed by Zen and writing.

I like writing about big turning points, where professional and personal lives coalesce, where the boundaries are coming down, and you're faced with a set of choices which will change life forever.

If I dreamt this, while walking, walking in the London streets, the subconscious of each and every other life, past and present, brushing me in passing, what makes it real? Writing it down.

The biographer who writes the life of his subjects self-concept passes through a fade into the inner house of life.

It's actually very hard to find an area of the economy that doesn't fundamentally change in the measure that we are able to read and write life code.

Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.

There are very few things I would love to do other than a life of writing, and I think being a singer-songwriter and being an anthropologist are the two other things I can imagine doing.

I didn't write about aspects of my public life because that's a small part of my life.

I re-read a lot of my college writing while we were in rehearsals, and it was so strange. It was wonderful to go back and revisit that part of my life. It did kind of make me hungry for it again.

Most things good for writing are bad for life.

Acting can be a very reactive profession. Acting is a fantastic thing, and it's my life, but writing is also part of me too, so I did it and in so doing took responsibility for my own life.

Live life and write about life. Of the making of many books there is indeed no end, but there are more than enough books about books.

The great thing about writing compared to life is getting to tie things up.

Neither in my private life nor in my writings, have I ever made a secret of being an out-and-out unbeliever.

Whatever is going on in your life when you're writing has to somehow seep into your work.

You don't have to fight dragons to write books. You just have to live deeply the life you've been given.

Why be in music, why write songs, if you can't use them to explore life or an idealized vision of life?

Anyone who can only write about themselves or their life experiences, in my mind, isn't a very good writer.

Your testimony doesn't mean anything if it is not your testimony. So every song that I write it happened at one point in my life or another.

Experience of life (not of books) is the only capital usable in such a book as you have attempted; one can make no judicious use of this capital while it is new.

I knew how severe I had been and how bad things had been. The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one who poverty bothers.

For years I dreamed of having the sort of massive oak slab that would dominate a room...

The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when all your arrows are spent.

You don't write because you want to say something. You write because you have something to say.

If you know from whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations on where you can go.

The writer has to die to give birth to the intellectual in the service of the wretched of the earth.

Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline.

You need the devotion to your work that a priest of God has for his.

I do a lot of rewriting. It’s very painful.

Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.

Sometimes it helps to pick out one person-a real person you know, or an imagined person-and write to that one.