Quotes on Write

How can any one paint who cannot grade colors? How can any one write poetry who has not learnt to hear and see?

I have to write and play. If I became an electrician tomorrow, I'd still come home at night and write songs.

'Write' is almost the wrong verb for what I do. I think 'compose' is more accurate because you're trying to make the sounds in your mind and in your voice. So I compose while I'm driving or in the shower.

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.

I couldn't possibly write 'Next to Normal,' but God, I can weep and watch 'Next to Normal' five times.

A person who's only suffering can't write a poem. There are choices to be made, and you need to be objective.

I know this is going to sound very self-serving, and I apologize for it, but if you can write comedy, you can pretty much write anything, because it's the hardest. It's the most technically demanding, the most precisely evaluated form of writing. People know if it works or not. There's a big button marked 'fail,' and that's when nobody laughs.

It's nice to have writers write nice things about you and guys on radio and TV say nice things about you, but the guy who's in the locker next to you is the one you play the game for.

I'm a novelist, so I can't write about ideas unless they're attached to people.

When I was 14, I would sit up in my room and write till my eyes would bleed.

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

Write every day, just to keep in the habit, and remember that whatever you have written is neither as good nor as bad as you think it is. Just keep going, and tell yourself that you will fix it later.

If you make your living writing, and you can't write anything, it's over. It's very frightening.

It's not that I sit down and write great stuff without thinking, not at all. Most of it is terrible. But the stuff that feels fun and fresh to me tends to happen fairly unthinkingly.

I do write all the time about - you tell me what your dreams are. What are you chasing? It's not impossible. Name it.

The point of college is more to acquire skills than to acquire domain knowledge. One of the skills that is going to be most necessary: you have to be able to read with rigor and write with clarity. You have to be able to communicate. To make an argument, whether it's in a written piece or in front of a group of people.

I know my voice has a limited range of motion; I don't write dramatic monologues and pretend to be other people. But so far, my voice is broad enough to accommodate most of what I want to put into my poetry. I like my persona; I often wish I were him and not me.

I have this magpie instinct for the next glittering object. There are one or two things I know I can't write about, though: DIY, cricket, automobile repair. I could study it for a lifetime and not produce a word on the carburettor.

At least I'm at peace with myself. I have done my best to write a book about what really happened there and why it happened and it's done, it's published. I won't write another book on Vietnam.

I didn't write much until I turned 40. Up until then I felt constrained by a sense of the discipline of New Testament studies and a sense of the ruling elite in theology and biblical studies.

I don't write for children. I write and someone says it's for children.