Quotes on Writing

Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind.

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming of themselves like grass.

No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.

If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.

I started out as a poet. I've always been a poet since I was 7 or 8. And so I feel myself to be fundamentally a poet who got into writing novels.

It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's 'mature' critics often are.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

To hold a pen is to be at war.

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like child stringing beads in kindergarten, - happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.

The best books come from someplace inside. You don't write because you want to, but because you have to.

In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them.

I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark.

It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.

To me, movies and music go hand in hand. When I'm writing a script, one of the first things I do is find the music I'm going to play for the opening sequence.

Writing is an extreme privilege but it's also a gift. It's a gift to yourself and it's a gift of giving a story to someone.

Getting a great idea with song writing is a lot like love. You don't know why this one is different, but it is. You don't know why this one is better, but it is. It sticks in your head, and you can't stop thinking about it.

I often get ideas for songs on the tour bus at odd times. Like at 6am when no one is around, I'd just write.

And if you're horrible to me I'm going to write a song about you and you are not going to like it. That's how I operate.