Quotes on Writing

Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper.

I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.

To defend what you've written is a sign that you are alive.

Not a wasted word. This has been a main point to my literary thinking all my life.

Making people believe the unbelievable is no trick; it's work... Belief and reader absorption come in the details: An overturned tricycle in the gutter of an abandoned neighborhood can stand for everything.

You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length.

In every song I write, whether it's a love song or a political song or a song about family, the one thing that I find is feeling lost and trying to find your way.

Transforming a brand into a socially responsible leader doesn't happen overnight by simply writing new marketing and advertising strategies. It takes effort to identify a vision that your customers will find credible and aligned with their values.

The difference between writing a book and being on television is the difference between conceiving a child and having a baby made in a test tube.

I didn't make any money from my writing until much later. I published about 80 stories for nothing. I spent on literature.

I started writing while I was a little boy. Maybe it's because I was reading a lot of books I admired, and thought that I would like to write something like that someday. Also, my love for good writing pushed me.

We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover up all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn't any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work, although, there has been in these days, some interest in this kind of thing.

Having been the discoverer of many splendid things, he is said to have asked his friends and relations that, after his death, they should place on his tomb a cylinder enclosing a sphere, writing on it the proportion of the containing solid to that which is contained.

If you could stop every atom in its position and direction, and if your mind could comprehend all the actions thus suspended, then if you were really, really good at algebra you could write the formula for all the future; and although nobody can be so clever as to do it, the formula must exist just as if one could.

I will write the evangel-poem of comrades and of love.

A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul.

The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.

Grandma told me Mama was once caught by the Principal for writing in the front of her book, "In Case of Fire, Throw This in First." I have never had so much respect for Mama as the day I heard this.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

Wilson was once asked how long it took him to write a speech. He answered, 'That depends. If I am to speak 10 minutes, I need a week for preparation. If 15 minutes, 3 days. If half hour, two days. If an hour, I am ready now.'

Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.