Here, we’ve compiled a list of the best Wrote Quotes from famous authors such as Jerry Spinelli, Jon Meacham, George Halas, Steve Berry, Michael Connelly. Let’s look at these pieces of wisdom. We definitely have something to learn from them!
1
I’m remembering one book that I wrote, ‘Fourth Grade Rats,’ that took a month to write, but most of them, full-length novels, I would say about a year.
2
Part of what I loved – and love – about being around older people is the tangible sense of history they embody. I’m interested in military history, for instance, because both my grandfathers fought in World War II. I’m interested in writing because one of those grandfathers wrote books.
3
At last, the newspapers discovered the Bears. I kept writing articles about upcoming games, and by reading the papers, I learned editors like superlatives. I blush when I think how many times I wrote that the next game was going to be the most difficult of the season or how a new player was the fastest man in the West.
4
I love all of my children equally, all of my printed books, and each one bears a special piece of me. But the one I’m most proud of is the one no one will ever see – the very first manuscript I ever wrote, back in 1990. It took me a year to do it.
5
My favorite is ‘The Last Coyote.’ I’m not saying that’s the best book I’ve written; I hope I haven’t written my best book yet, but that one was the first book I wrote as a full-time author, with my full-time focus. I have a nostalgic feeling about it.
6
My poems – I don’t even like the sound of that, in a way. Not that anyone else wrote them. But we know that only people who are really close to us care about our personal experience.
7
You know, one of the only times I ever wrote about art was the obituary of Warhol that I did for the Village Voice.
8
I did go there later, but I hadn’t been there before I wrote the book. Sometimes I feel like the imagined can feel more real than the real?
9
I was probably 35 when I wrote the first story. The voice is kind of a mix in that it has a young voice, but it’s also someone who’s looking back. I like that kind of double vision.
10
First of all, Shakespeare is about pleasure and interest. He was from the first moment he actually wrote something for the stage, and he remains so.
11
Although Bill Finger literally typed the scripts in the early days, he wrote the scripts from ideas that we mutually collaborated on. Many of the unique concepts and story twists also came from my own fertile imagination.
12
Jim Morrison wrote the words for ‘Hello, I Love You’ when we were still in a band called Rick & the Ravens.
13
I had this vivid dream and woke up and I wrote the ‘MyPillow’ logo all over the house.
14
The very paradigm of revolution, of right versus wrong, good versus bad, is a relic with no bearing on the present. Yet artists, exhibitions, and curators valorize the sixties. People who wrote about these artists 30 years ago still write about them in the same ways, often for the same magazines.
15
I wrote about people who liked fake fireplaces in their parlor, who thought a brass horse with a clock embedded in its flank was wonderful.
16
I love the BlackBerry. I’m on it all the time. I literally wrote my whole book, ‘Unwrap Your Sweet Life,’ on the BlackBerry while I was working out on the StairMill. So many people tease me about having a BlackBerry, but I meet a lot of people who still use one. Obama has a BlackBerry!
17
When I wrote songs like ‘Everyone I Love is Dead,’ I never thought about how I was going to execute them live.
18
I wrote things for the school’s newspaper, and – like all teenagers – I dabbled in poetry.
19
What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
20
I wrote my own verses. Anything I did, I wrote myself.
21
There have been times I’ve planted stuff in songs where four years later I’ll be singing it from a subconscious, kind of chameleon little lizard mind… and at a certain moment, all of a sudden, I’ll hear a line from a different vantage point and it’ll change its meaning. It’s something I wrote but it changed because I did.
22
When the Exxon Valdez spilled in 1989, I was angry. I even wrote on the back of my car, Boycott Exxon!
23
As I wrote, I found that Aibileen had some things to say that really weren’t in her character. She was older, soft-spoken, and she started showing some attitude.
24
I might do my own independent film, that my husband wrote for me, if all the ducks are in a row.
25
I wrote the very first stories in science fiction which dealt with homosexuality, The World Well Lost and Affair With a Green Monkey.
26
I wrote ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’ at the age of 30 under intense, unshared personal stress and in extreme privacy. As an intelligence officer in the guise of a junior diplomat at the British Embassy in Bonn, I was a secret to my colleagues, and much of the time to myself.
27
Every word I wrote in my book is documented, certified, true, and correct. The truth wins, and that is my picture.
28
I wrote a book called The Taste of New Wine because I couldn’t find a book that talked about the reality of the situation and how we were dishonest and afraid.
29
I produced and directed a movie a couple years ago that won some awards that Samuel Goldwyn released called ‘The Last Good Time’. I wrote, produced and directed it, but I wasn’t in it.
30
I never fantasized or invented a thing, not one thing. I knew every single thing I ever wrote about.
31
I’ve done more crap than I care to remember. I really have. ‘Airwolf.’ ‘Murder, She Wrote.’ ‘Amazon Women on the Moon.’ But you learn from all these bad shows. What you don’t want to do and what you don’t want to be involved with.
32
I wrote ‘Option B’ because I want other people to know it can get better, and I want to help people make it better.
33
You know, bad poetry I wrote in high school can still be found on the Internet, and, you know, there’s a Web log of our college newspaper. You know, there’s so many different stages of my creative development are sort of on-record if somebody were to choose to look for them.
34
While working on my first five books, I kept wishing I was writing a novel. I thought until you wrote a novel, you weren’t taken seriously as a writer. It used to trouble me a lot, but nothing troubles me now, and besides, there has been a change. I think short stories are taken more seriously now than they were.
35
The day Guy Clark passed away was the day we wrote ‘Girl Goin’ Nowhere.’ It was the first day I had met Jeremy Bussey, who I wrote the song with.
36
Were there stories I wrote along the way that were terrible clinkers? God, yes. But they were all a product of their time, and I did the best I could.
37
Twyla Tharp put it together from the material I wrote and recorded over my whole career. I thought it was pretty good, but how objective could I be?
38
I worked initially in very low-budget independent films that I often wrote. My early work was all written by myself, and then I adapted ‘Tsotsi,’ so I was used to the writing process being, in a way, integral to my directing. I felt it really prepared me.
39
When I wrote The Virgin Suicides, I gave myself very strict rules about the narrative voice: the boys would only be able to report what they had seen or found or what had been told to them.
40
This ceremony and the intellectual aura associated with the Nobel Prizes have grown from the wisdom of a practical chemist who wrote a remarkable will.
41
In New York I was always so scared of saying that I wrote fiction. It just seemed like, ‘Who am I to dare to do that thing here? The epicenter of publishing and writers?’ I found all that very intimidating and avoided writing as a response.
42
I wrote the song For A Dancer for a friend of mine who died in a fire. He was in the sauna in a house that burned down, so he had no idea anything was going on. It was very sad.
43
I just wrote about childhood as I had known it.
44
When the Beatles wrote ‘Paperback Writer,’ it couldn’t have been the same old thing. You can hear so many influences in it, from the blues to Bach, and it’s not just verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge chorus. They start off singing a cappella, almost like a Bach chorale, and the song goes into this bluesy guitar riff.
45
I wrote my earliest piece for The Sunday Times about being a young wife.
46
At the time I wrote Xone I had never been on the Internet.
47
I was writing very early, like I was involved in our high school literary magazine, which was called ‘Pariah.’ The football team was the Bears, and the literary magazine was ‘Pariah.’ It was great. It was definitely a real sub-culture. But I wrote stories for them.
48
Til 1983, I wrote primarily for other psychologists and expected that they would be the principal audience for my book.
49
‘There’s nothing new under the sun’: that’s what you wrote, Ecclesiastes. But you yourself were born new under the sun.
50
I wrote lyrics that were intensely personal to me a few years ago. Maybe people know me better now.
51
No writer of a portion of the Bible was perfect. It was the direct and miraculous operation of the Holy Spirit that what they wrote is without mistake.
52
I said, other people can write songs, let’s see if I can. So the first 400 or 500 wound up on the floor somewhere. Then I wrote one called Melissa.
53
It was at this moment that I wrote my first important paper in theoretical physics. I was 32 years old, 5 years beyond the alleged age of senility for theorists.
54
When I wrote ‘Lord of the Flies’ – I had no idea it would even get published.
55
Growing up in Memphis and listening to all kinds of music and dreaming… So that was one of the first times I wrote a complete song and set it to music and the whole bit. From then on, I was busy with it.
56
All my life, I have taken inventory at intervals. For example, when I became a movie actor and suddenly I had to deal with fame, money and playing so many roles, I lost myself. I said, ‘Who am I?’ And I wrote my first book to deal with that, ‘The Ragman’s Son.’
57
From my anger, frustration, and hurt, I wrote the short story that would later become ‘The Hate U Give.’
58
I got the regular call, that they were doing a Broadway musical of Hairspray, and would I come and audition. I was familiar with the movie, because at the time it came out my lover wrote for Premiere magazine, and we had to see everything.
59
I wanted to be a classical actress. I plodded along. I went to junior college in San Francisco, I was in a Repertory Company. My hero was Eva Le Gallienne, who was a great theater actress at the turn of the century who created her own company, and she wrote these hilarious autobiographies at the time.
60
When I wrote ‘Sideways Stories from Wayside School’ I never expected it to be published. It was kind of a hobby. Now, it’s a job, but it’s a job I like very much.
61
I wrote on the fourth season of ‘Arrested Development.’
62
For me, being a writer was never a choice. I was born one. All through my childhood I wrote short stories and stuffed them in drawers. I wrote on everything. I didn’t do my homework so I could write.
63
Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
64
What’s going to be hard for me is to try to divorce myself as much as possible from what I wrote. I’ll have to approach it simply as raw material and try to craft a film script out of it.
65
I remember my father banging away on an IBM Selectric in the garage. He wrote his first novels on that machine. I remember its pebbly surface, its cold heft. It made its mark, literally and violently.
66
If I wrote a play with four characters every single one of them would talk like me regardless of age or sex.
67
I basically wrote the code and the specs and documentation for how the client and server talked to each other.
68
As I wrote about my childhood, I realized that there was no big tragedy. Being multiethnic is not a tragedy. I didn’t have any big life-threatening illnesses, no tumors, no kidney malfunctions… I came from a very poor family. I was chubby as a kid.
69
For the novels I wrote before selling anything, I didn’t outline much. I had a vague idea of the story.
70
I wanted to write it long before I wrote Every Night, Josephine! I’d been thinking about it a long time.
71
I never wrote for children. I wrote with respect for the audience, which I’ve maintained all my life. Doesn’t mean I couldn’t be risque, but I did it smartly, without being vulgar.
72
Shakespeare was a man who wrote poetry. I’m a man who writes poetry. Why not compare yourself to the best?
73
I wrote my children’s book because I believe there are children that are hurting and may need to know that there is love out there for them- God’s love.
74
When I wrote ‘Silver Linings,’ I thought I was writing a book about the Philadelphia Eagles and male bonding, but when the book came out, it was surprising to me that the mental health community embraced it.
75
Brahms believed that there was no need to publish absolutely everything that Schubert ever wrote.
76
We became the songs we wrote.
77
I wrote the tunes and sang only nonsense words. Then came Moore and dressed them with the lyrics.
78
‘Spring Day’ – I wrote main lyrics based on my personal experience with old friends. It is about my sad memories with him, and it makes me sentimental whenever I listen to the song.
79
I deliberately wrote a poem in my last book where I was suggesting that there are other passions as great as or more important than the passion of sex.
80
I didn’t even walk for graduation – I did graduate, though. I got this homeschool deal. I didn’t have to go to school because I was depressed, and my mom wrote all these essays for me. I didn’t write one of them. She literally got me my diploma.
81
Homer was able to give us no information relating to the truth, for he wrote of human rather than divine things.
82
When I wrote ‘Dear Fatty,’ I realised that sitting and writing alone is an absolute joy.
83
Filmmakers and critics wrote about each other and sometimes very harshly. This no longer exists.
84
I just wrote what I felt like writing since they seemed to sell.
85
Sweden was very nice. I did a lot of television. I wrote, directed and was in a lot of television there.
86
Oddly enough, Bruce Lee wrote some great philosophy.
87
I always wrote poetry and stuff like that, so putting songs together wasn’t that spectacular.
88
I spill it out as fast as I can. I don’t really edit. In Brazil, recently, I wrote 70 pages. In London, 80 pages.
89
I wrote ‘Evil Spider’ about wanting someone that’s already taken. I guess it was based on a personal experience, but I went a lil extreme on the theme… me being a spider trying to snare someone. In real life, I was just observing!
90
I wrote a script with my brother which ended up, somehow, on the Black List in 2008.
91
I’m not sure if they do this in the States, but in Korea, until high school, on your graduation diploma there’s a line that states your future goal. Kids write ‘president’ or ‘astronaut,’ or whatever. I always wrote ‘singer.’
92
I wrote my first novel-length story when I was 14 but had no idea what to do with it. Brisbane was a long way from the publishing industry then. Nowhere’s a long way from the publishing industry now.
93
That first record, I wrote before I had a record deal.
94
I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals, but even as I withdrew into this reading, I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan.
95
I started rapping at the age of 12. That’s when I wrote my first song, but I was more intrigued on learning how the recording process works: how do you create music and what materials I needed. So I educated myself musically so that I could focus on creating my own.
96
And then I wrote my first autobiography when I – well, it was 23 years ago. And since then I’ve written about one book every two years.
97
George wrote Taxman, and I played guitar on it. He wrote it in anger at finding out what the taxman did. He had never known before then what could happen to your money.
98
When we wrote the Constitution, the intention was to give the commander in chief the authority how to use the forces when you authorize him to be able to use the forces.
99
I never even thought of myself as deadpan until someone wrote an article about me about a year after I was doing comedy. There was a paper called the ‘Boston Phoenix,’ and someone wrote a description of what I was doing and that’s where I first saw ‘deadpan.’
100
Growing up, I would watch a movie on video and would go to the back of the VHS and locate the address for Universal Pictures or MGM or whatever. I’d write to the studios asking them if I could be in a movie. They never wrote me back.
101
I wrote each book in thirty-five days flat – just to get the darned thing finished.
102
As an adolescent I wrote comic books, because I read lots of them, and fantasy novels set in Malaysia and Central Africa.
103
‘Twenty One Pilots’ is a play by Arthur Miller, who also wrote ‘All My Sons.’ It’s about a guy who’s creating and developing parts for airplanes in war time, when it comes to his attention that some of these parts were faulty.
104
I was on ‘Murder She Wrote’ with Angela Lansbury. She was fantastic… she was lovely to everyone, she was always on time, prepared. Whereas when I worked with Bob Hope, he didn’t know his lines. He had to have these huge big cards… he hardly said two words to me all day.
105
Of course, we wrote the songs accordingly and performed and recorded them that way. At that time, we really thought it was right, but you know, seen in retrospect, it made the album sound forced, and not really great.
106
I wrote The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God in five hours, but I had it all planned out. It isn’t poetry and it does not pretend to be, but it does what it sets out to do.
107
You know, if I wrote the arrangements two years from now, they would probably be a lot slicker.
108
I love rare books. Not that I own a lot of them, mind you. You couldn’t quite call me a rare-book collector. But I did once work in a rare-books library, and I wrote a novel about a rare book.
109
My old English buddy, John Rackham, wrote and told me what made science fiction different from all other kinds of literature – science fiction is written according to the science fiction method.
110
I wrote in my book, ‘unPlanned,’ about a church that kicked me out when they found out that I worked for Planned Parenthood. I often get questioned about that, whether I still think they made the wrong decision. My answer is a resounding ‘Yes.’
111
It’s called Sisters of the Winter Madrigal. It was interesting for me to see it done after so many years; because I wrote it and I didn’t realize what a rage I was in.
112
I think Shakespeare is really the one. Words as music and music as words. Everything he wrote was good, which is really frightening.
113
In 1988, my mother led a nationwide election campaign, wrote a bestselling book, had her first child, and became the youngest and first female prime minister of the Muslim world. All in one year! For her detractors, this wasn’t good enough. She was unacceptable because she was a woman.
114
Paul’s the writer. Yeah, I wrote a little of that stuff, but that’s just technically true. In spirit, and in essence of the truth, it doesn’t matter. So I don’t know, maybe I’m being foolish for not being technical. Yeah, I wrote a certain portion of the things.
115
‘Reign’ is probably the oldest one on the record. I wrote that when I was 19. ‘The Dead They Don’t Come Back,’ which is the last song on the album, I wrote when I was 20, and ‘Harlem River’ I just wrote last year. It spans from 2007 to 2012.
116
When I was still in prep school – 14, 15 – I started keeping notebooks, journals. I started writing, almost like landscape drawing or life drawing. I never kept a diary, I never wrote about my day and what happened to me, but I described things.
117
I wrote eight full-length adult novels in my twenties. None of them were published.
118
This book that I just wrote is going to be coming out very soon to Australia.
119
For some reason, I wrote about the bed we slept in when I was a kid. It was a half-acre of misery, that bed, sagging in the middle, red hair sticking out of the mattress, the spring gone and the fleas leaping all over the place.
120
Tricker the Squirrel is the best piece I ever wrote. It’s intricate.
121
On that other novels followed: but I still wrote fairy tales and dreamy poems of another world.
122
‘Merry Wives of Windsor’ is a wonderful machine. It’s one of the great farces, and it’s astonishing to remember that this is written by the same man who wrote ‘Hamlet,’ ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ or ‘Cymbeline.’ It’s so similar, and yet the form is so different.
123
I wrote to the local news guy when I was 12 years old. I said, ‘What do I need to do to be you one day?’
124
Well, I think that when you direct a movie or write it. And in the case of the two movies I did, I wrote and directed, they occupy a special place for you.
125
Henry Miller wrote novels, but he calls his protagonist Henry, often Henry Miller, and his books are in this gray area between memoir and novel.
126
I was terrible at straight items. When I wrote obituaries, my mother said the only thing I ever got them to do was die in alphabetical order.
127
If you want to put out a song that you wrote yesterday, tomorrow go on Twitter, type in a new URL, and give it to the people!
128
My mother was an actress in comedies. My father wrote scenarios. They were not opposed to my being an actor. I really didn’t know what it meant, but I wanted to be one anyway.
129
I’d always liked to write, but I never wanted to be a writer, because it seemed a sissy occupation. It is. To this day, I find it terribly easy. And so, rather than trying to hunt up a text, I just wrote one.
130
I wrote two plotted books, got some of the fundamentals of storytelling down, then… it’s sort of like taking the training wheels off, trying to write a book that’s fun in the same way without relying on quite such mechanical or external beats.
131
Well, I actually wrote her a letter a couple of days ago congratulating her. The tone I tried to convey in the letter is, look, you are a part of a great American historical process.
132
I grew up in a place where everybody was a storyteller, but nobody wrote. It was that kind of Celtic, storytelling tradition: everybody would have a story at the pub or at parties, even at the clubs and raves.
133
I think I was 9, and my mom ordered them for me from a catalogue. They bred like crazy, and I was selling gerbils all around Michigan. They wrote a story about me in the local newspaper.
134
When it began I wrote this passionate letter to people I knew, studio members, of course, and other people with whom we have worked over the years and I said come and teach our students.
135
I wrote an article on a new Porsche for ‘Automobile Magazine.’ I knew the editor, and she asked me to write this article. So I’m more proud of that than anything.
136
The first song that I wrote was when I was with The Del Rios. I was like 14 years old but I was always putting my thoughts down on paper even before then because it was like an escape – a way of unleashing all the stuff.
137
It’s better for me to go up against someone’s passion with my passion and then clarifying something that he wrote. Then I know how to work around certain things.
138
I always knew I wanted to be a musician, and I always knew I wanted to write, ’cause the people I was listening to all wrote. I never thought it was an option to sing anyone else’s songs.
139
When I was 5, my mother threw a party, and a friend and I wrote and performed a play called The Dutch Doll.
140
Modern scientific knowledge appeared piecemeal. Historians wrote about human history; physicists tackled the material world; and biologists studied the world of living organisms. But there were few links between these disciplines, as researchers focused on getting the details right.
141
Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn’t have any beginning or any end. He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but it was.
142
I wrote the first book, Harvest of Stars, and as I was writing it, I saw that certain implications had barely been touched on… It’s perfectly obvious that two completely revolutionary things are going on, with cybernetics, and biological science.
143
I think there’s a poet who wrote once a tragedy by Shakespeare, a symphony by Beethoven and a thunderstorm are based on the same elements. I think that’s a beautiful line.
144
Christ himself wrote nothing, but furnished endless material for books and songs of gratitude and praise.
145
I don’t think my wife likes me very much, when I had a heart attack she wrote for an ambulance.
146
I met Arcade Fire on their first record, ‘Funeral.’ I loved that record, and it was a record I was listening to while I wrote ‘Where the Wild Things Are.’ Those songs – especially ‘Wake Up’ and ‘Neighbourhood’ – there’s a lot of that record that’s about childhood.
147
‘Dear Mr. Henshaw’ came about because two different boys from different parts of the country asked me to write a book about a boy whose parents were divorced, and so I wrote ‘Dear Mr. Henshaw,’ and it won the Newbery, and I was – it’s been very popular.
148
I was 18, at art school, and saw this cute boy playing banjo. I was obsessed. I taught myself how to play. I listened to a lot of country and just messed around. The second song I wrote on the banjo was ‘Good to Be a Man.’ That what’s got me signed.
149
The first book I wrote was The Bride Price which was a romantic book, but my husband burnt the book when he saw it. I was the typical African woman, I’d done this privately, I wanted him to look at it, approve it and he said he wouldn’t read it.
150
My wife grew up loving country music, so I always run songs by her whether I wrote it or if somebody pitched it to me.
151
No, I just thought of a story and wrote down what I saw. It was about two kids in Ireland who went around killing people. It was called Travelers, and it was made as an independent film.
152
One of the first papers I wrote at the University of Wisconsin, in 1977, was on stem cells. I realized that if I changed the environment that these cells were in, I could turn the cells into bone, and if I changed the environment a bit more, they would form fat cells.
153
And that’s how I wrote to NICAP, but then later, just very soon after that, like three weeks later, we started getting phone calls from government agents.
154
We wrote what sounded good to us and hoped it would find a home.
155
I don’t admire Freud as much as some people do. Imagine Shakespeare being aware of the Oedipal complex when he wrote Hamlet. It would have been a disaster.
156
So where a lot of people will spend three weeks on one song, I will write 10 in three weeks. Maybe the song that they sculpt is going to be as successful as just one of the 10 that I wrote.
157
Raymond Chandler once wrote that Dashiell Hammett gave murder back to the people who really committed it.
158
You know, after filming the movie the book was still just as big. I think it was actually bigger. I think Stephen King went back and wrote extra pages. He’s fantastic.
159
I didn’t write ‘Snow White’ for any class, but I got bitten by the screenwriting bug and wrote a couple of scripts in my spare time instead of going to keg parties or something.
160
‘Reign’ – and this might sound cheesy, but it’s a dream I had. I dreamt everything that happened in that song, woke up, and wrote the song.
161
I loved the last album, and it was one hundred percent me. But this is like me two years later, who understands a little bit more about music and understands a little bit more about making an album. I wrote a lot more.
162
I think what I and most other sociologists of religion wrote in the 1960s about secularization was a mistake. Our underlying argument was that secularization and modernity go hand in hand. With more modernization comes more secularization.
163
So I’ll write it, and then I’ll find out that I actually wrote something that is utterly useless. You can’t use it in the story and it doesn’t fit. So I just throw it away. I’ve done that countless times.
164
I was a writer for hire. I wrote to pay the bills.
165
I wrote ‘She’s a Lady’ on the back of a TWA menu, flying back from London after doing Tom Jones’s TV show. Jones’s manager wanted me to write him a song. If I have an idea and I don’t have a pad of paper, I’ll write on whatever is available. What’s the difference? Paper is paper.
166
I wrote my thesis on welfare policy.
167
I wish I wrote more about the world at more distance from myself.
168
Mike Campbell and Don Henley and I wrote ‘The Heart of the Matter,’ which was a huge hit for Don.
169
I wrote ‘Me and Ma’ to celebrate a beautiful phase of my life with people.
170
I wrote a novel about the combat experiences I didn’t have in Vietnam.
171
Shakespeare wrote great plays that we’re still watching all these years later. Charlie Chaplin made great comedies and they are still as funny today as they ever were.
172
I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try.
173
The first poem I ever wrote, about loss, when I was 5 years old, expressed the themes of everything I would ever write.
174
If someone wrote it and it had a peculiar twist, I’ve read it.
175
The original Return of the Living Dead, I was attached to direct it, and I wrote the story. Production was delayed. In the meantime I went to London to do Lifeforce.
176
It’s not fair that people wrote that all of my films had not done well. There were a few films like ‘Nippu,’ ‘Devudu Chesina Manushulu’ and ‘Sarostaru’ which were really bad. But, ‘Veera’ and ‘Dharuvu’ had done well. Strangely, people have added them to my ‘flop list.’
177
They wrote it that my moustache was insured for 13 million.
178
On a shelf above my computer are five letters that spell out W-R-I-T-E. Just in case I forget why I’m there. I also have ‘Wonder Woman’ paraphernalia from when I wrote five issues of the comic, and pictures of my husband and kids.
179
I am not overlooking any mail. I’m looking at all of it. I even wrote back to the Viagra people.
180
When I record somebody else’s song, I have to make it my own or it doesn’t feel right. I’ll say to myself, I wrote this and he doesn’t know it!
181
New-Year’s Day arriving, and the ministers, to whom I wrote, remaining silent, I consider their silence as evidence, that they cannot prove what I said not to be from the Lord, and have therefore published as I was directed.
182
Once I was condemned to three months’ absolute silence. As I could not speak, I wrote a book.
183
I’ve always romanticized the late ’40s and ’50s – the cars, jazz, the open roads and lack of pollution. Now there are more vehicles, less hitchhikers, more billboards and power lines and stuff. People wrote wonderful long letters that took months to receive, and now everything is email.
184
I knew that if I wrote a new book every six months or every year, if I continued to read great books, eventually I would write something worthy of publication. I understood I might be in my forties or my fifties or even my sixties, but I felt confident that it would happen.
185
I was asked by a group to write a song on the theme of brotherhood. This was before women’s liberation, when brotherhood meant men and women both, so I wrote the song. Since I had always been very fond of the Passion Chorale, I wrote words to that great piece.
186
I wrote five issues of that and got the sack. Actually, they paid me for eight, but they changed their minds about the direction and threw three issues out the window.
187
It was psychobabbler Abraham Maslow who wrote of the phenomena of self-actualization. What Maslow failed to grasp is that reaching true self-actualization can only be ultimately achieved when you have your own brand of ammunition.
188
Then you start another book and suddenly the galley proofs of the last one come in and you have to wrench your attention away from what you’re writing and try to remember what you were thinking when you wrote the previous one.
189
I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
190
Coming back to the topic of computer security, the TCP Wrapper is an example of such a safety net. I wrote it when my systems were under attack by someone who appeared to walk through walls.
191
It was my 16th birthday – my mom and dad gave me my Goya classical guitar that day. I sat down, wrote this song, and I just knew that that was the only thing I could ever really do – write songs and sing them to people.
192
And that’s why I wrote the book, because our country really needs to understand, if people in this nation understood what our foreign policy is really about, what foreign aid is about, how our corporations work, where our tax money goes, I know we will demand change.
193
I wrote ‘(‘Til) I Kissed You’ about a girl I met in Australia. Her name was Lilian, and she was very, very inspirational. I was married, but… I wrote the song about her on the way back home.
194
Then there was Clark Ashton Smith, who wrote for Weird Tales and who had a wild imagination. He wasn’t a very talented writer, but his imagination was wonderful.
195
When I did ‘Happy Birthday,’ I wrote the treatment for the video before I wrote the record. And once I wrote the video, I had a clear understanding of what I wanted; I created the soundtrack to that video.
196
I lived to write, and wrote to live.
197
And all of Laura’s stuff, what they wrote originally wasn’t as good and Constance wound up doing that herself. That was all her stuff, reading to the child, because she had children herself and that’s what she would have done.
198
I figured somebody wrote a story who had a typewriter and I thought that movies were made by the cowboys and that they just said, ‘Okay, you fall off the horse this time.’
199
In the first year, 1988, I wrote and sold 3 novels.
200
I started to write in 2001. I wrote the books for the fun of it. It was an old idea I had had since the nineties.
201
To the audience, it’s like I’m changing the subject every five seconds, but to me, my show’s almost like a 90-minute song that I know exactly. I wrote every note, and I know exactly where everything is.
202
When I look back at my career as an author, I don’t look at the first book that was ever published as to where my career began – I look to the first book that I ever wrote.
203
Twenty years ago, I wrote a book called ‘It Takes a Village.’ And a lot of people looked at the title and asked, ‘What the heck do you mean by that?’ This is what I mean. None of us can raise a family, build a business, heal a community or lift a country totally alone.
204
I wrote a play for Miu Miu called ‘The Moment Is the Present, That’s Why It’s Called a Gift.’ Instead of doing a catwalk show, all the actors wore the clothes and performed a 20-minute play.
205
Big Night and The Impostors are both things that I wrote.
206
‘Boyz-n-the-Hood’ was actually supposed to be written for Eazy’s group. He had a group out in New York called Home Boys Only, called HBO. One of them looked like LL Cool J. Eazy wanted to write a song for them, a street song, like what we were doing on the mix tapes. So when I wrote it, it was too West Coast for them.
207
Then a friend of Jim’s suggested we make a theme song to explain the story, and this is where the Mads came from. Josh and I wrote it into the theme song.
208
For ‘King Cole’s American Salvage,’ I rode around in the wrecker with a local driver and watched him deal with customers and hook up the cars. I watched the guy who tore apart the cars in the junkyard. I also wrote poems about those guys. I loved hanging around the yard.
209
I’d gone to Oxford to do graduate studies in the history of the slave trade, but I came across Georgiana’s letters, gave up that thesis, and wrote one on her instead. When I learned that Georgiana’s great-nephews supported opposite sides in the American Civil War, I knew this would be the perfect sequel.
210
There are definitely some folks in my hometown who are unhappy with the way I portrayed my hometown… But I think most folks realize I wrote this book not to disparage the hometown but to really try to understand why so many kids who grew up like I did struggled.
211
I write from my imagination, not from what I’ve read in books or seen on TV or to make money. I wrote from an idea I was passionate about.
212
Bob Dylan’s first couple of records in the 60’s weren’t considered cover records, but he only wrote one or two original songs on each album.
213
What I did was I completed the half-hour film, but before really showing it, I wrote two more sections for a potential feature film which I didn’t think would really happen, but at least I had it in case.
214
My dad was always such a frustrated artist. He always worked very hard to support his family, doing a bunch of ridiculous jobs. He wanted to be a painter, but then he also wrote science-fiction novels in his spare time.
215
In some ways I think it would be very dignified if I went away for twenty years and then wrote my fourth book.
216
I sang ‘O Holy Night’ with the Vatican orchestra, but also a Blake – a lullaby that William Blake wrote for the Christ child, and I set it to music, and the Vatican orchestra played the music.
217
I suppose I started writing seriously at 16 years old. I thought I wrote a novel at 16 and sent it to New York! They sent it back because it wasn’t novel.
218
I was always depressed growing up. There wasn’t a reason for it, I just was. I was sad and morose. I cried a lot, I wrote a lot, and I read a lot; and that was how I dealt with it.
219
The area we define as what Quora’s good at is long-form text that’s useful over time, and where you care about who wrote the text. Not that you need to be friends with them, just that they’re someone trustworthy.
220
We wrote verses that condemned us, with no hope of pardon, to the most bitter solitude.
221
I wrote so much about fandom and participation for NPR that I eventually realized my most fertile way of participating in music is to actually play it, at least in a way that made the most sense to me.
222
It came about as follows: over the years when I was involved in dianetics, I wrote the beginnings of many stories. I would get an idea, and then write the beginning, and then never touch it again.
223
I’ve always thought that whether I’m writing or not, I’ve gotta pick the best songs, whether or not they’re mine. I’m not gonna sing them just because I wrote them. I’ve gotta find the best songs to make the best record I can.
224
After we wrote The Wreckoning, our record label did listen.
225
I can never read this book, just like I can never see a movie that I wrote a screenplay for. I can read it and see it physically, but I can’t accurately judge it. I’m too close to it. If I read it ten times I’ll have ten different reactions.
226
Someone wrote a piece about Henry Green in The Partisan Review that was so intriguing that I got one of his novels, Loving, I believe, which was the first that came to attention in the United States.
227
When I was in sixth grade there was a talent show, and I wrote my first sketch, ‘The Dentist.’ I played the dentist, and I had my friend play a patient. It was sort of what can go wrong at the dentist, and I just remember I had lots of fake blood and everything.
228
Writing about 2,000 words in three hours every morning, ‘Casino Royale’ dutifully produced itself. I wrote nothing and made no corrections until the book was finished. If I had looked back at what I had written the day before I might have despaired.
229
I used to be a calligrapher for weddings and events – that was my side job while I was auditioning. I think handwritten notes are a lost art form. When I booked my first pilot, my dad wrote me a letter that I still have. The idea of someone taking the time to put pen to paper is really special.
230
From the moment I wrote ‘Leaf Storm’ I realized I wanted to be a writer and that nobody could stop me and that the only thing left for me to do was to try to be the best writer in the world.
231
I wrote my first piece about the disruption of the Harvard Business School in 1999. Because you could see this coming. I haven’t yet done the one about the disruption of the Stanford Business School.
232
People like that I wrote a book – that’s cute, but oh, making a business out of it? That’s not nice.
233
I have spent over 60 years bent over a guitar and to know that I wrote 70 compositions that masters have recorded, that makes me feel so good and full, and proud and thankful to the good Lord.
234
I wrote a great deal… but very little of any importance; there are not more than four of five papers which I can still remember with some satisfaction.
235
That’s such a thrill – a story I wrote at the beginning of my career, and it’s still packin’ the house.
236
I wrote a tennis book about Chris Evert and her then-husband, John Lloyd. It was called ‘Lloyd on Lloyd’ and became a No 1 bestseller.
237
I can’t stay mad very long. I get grumpy when I read a bad review. I say, ‘How could he say that about my music?’ Then I forget about it. If I got mad every time somebody wrote something negative about me, I’d be exploding all the time. I’d be burned out just from reading reviews.
238
I’ve got a role in the new Billy Bob Thornton movie that Billy Bob wrote and is going to direct called ‘Jayne Mansfield’s Car.’ I only have four scenes, but I have as much dialogue as anybody in the movie.
239
I wrote ‘Actor’ all on the computer. I didn’t touch any instruments until I was in the studio. So while I had all these ornate arrangements, I didn’t have any songs.
240
No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.
241
I think we have a great deal of mythology around writing. We believe that only a few people can really do it. I wrote a book called ‘The Right to Write.’ In it, I argued that all of us have the capacity to write. That it’s as normal to write as it is to speak.
242
Some years ago, I wrote a book called the Emperor’s New Mind and that book was describing a point of view I had about consciousness and why it was not something that comes about from complicated calculations.
243
In 1976 I wrote a lot about women trying to claim the right to work.
244
I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second.
245
Then I decided I couldn’t just crawl in the corner and die, so I started putting pen to paper and wrote some songs. I had no idea what for or who I was going to work with. I tried to find my way and direction.
246
When I was a kid, I wrote music – from the age of 11 until the age of 18.
247
The combination of pictures and words together can be really effective, and I began to realise in my career that unless I wrote my own words, then my message was diluted.
248
As for action movies, I did Tarzan, and I’m also about to shoot Meltdown, which John Carpenter wrote.
249
I was just learning to play guitar when Tracy Chapman came out. She wrote these songs, she played them by herself and I so admired her for that.
250
It was like a dream come true for me. When you write the book, it’s still intimate. It might have been a best-seller but it’s still my story, as I wrote it. The moment we or they make a movie, it’s not my story anymore. There’s a lot of letting go involved in the process.
251
I wrote it the right way, so it was copied the wrong way right. I mean the right way wrong.
252
Read not Milton, for he is dry; nor Shakespeare, for he wrote of common life.
253
Trump survives by Corum’s Law. This is a famous, well-tested theory and is named after Bill Corum, who once wrote sports for the Hearst papers when they were in New York.
254
One lady wrote me and told me how she wants to see me get beat up and near death and that kind of stuff.
255
There are some movie stars in Hollywood that are so scared, they also tell the reporter that they are recording them, in case there is something wrong with what they wrote about them in the papers.
256
I think it goes back to my high school days. In computer class, the first assignment was to write a program to print the first 100 Fibonacci numbers. Instead, I wrote a program that would steal passwords of students. My teacher gave me an A.
257
When I was sixteen, I wrote the first hundred or so pages of a novel about a piano that was haunted by the ghost of an evil blues musician.
258
Which is a wonderful irony, I have property there. I go back every chance I get. One of the main reasons I actually wrote the book, agreed to write it having never wanted to do that in my life, very intimidating by the way to write a book.
259
As the resignation letter which I wrote to the Prime Minister clearly implies, it was not the outcome I sought, but it is one that I accept without rancour, despite what might be described as the hard landing involved.
260
A good story is a good story no matter who wrote it.
261
I think it’s silly for anyone to think you could write under the influence, but if they’d like to think that, I’d like to keep the legend alive. Maybe I was under the influence when I wrote Jesus’ Son and I just didn’t know it.
262
It was about 105 degrees in Chicago. And that’s a time when everybody gets tired. I came into the clubhouse, and everybody was sitting around, and I said, ‘Beautiful day. Let’s play two!’ And everybody looked at me like I was crazy. There were a couple of writers around, and they wrote that, and it stayed with me.
263
I’m a commercial writer, not an author. Margaret Mitchell was an author. She wrote one book.
264
I think ‘Lost Boy’ is more of a metaphor for oneself. When I listen to that song, I don’t picture someone else. I kind of wrote it from a very honest place.
265
I don’t know where Bush is going – yet. But, Sharon obviously – I wrote somewhere in the last several months, that Sharon has adopted, essentially, the position of the Labor Party: that the Palestinians are here to stay.
266
I have some fond memories – a couple of the nights on the town … a couple of songs I wrote when I was messed up that I’m sure wouldn’t have come out of me unless I was messed up. It’s kind of happy-sad about those days – I could do anything I wanted to. I did. And now I don’t want to do any of that.
267
You have discovered so much kindness and good will to those you thought were oppressed, and had no helper, that I am sure you will not despise what I have wrote, if you judge it will be of any service to them.
268
I wrote the script of Patton. I had this very bizarre opening where he stands up in front of an American flag and gives this speech. Ultimately, I was fired. When the script was done, they hired another writer and that script was forgotten.
269
We wrote ‘Stellify’ for Rihanna, but as we got to the end of writing it, I thought, ‘You know what? I’m gonna keep this for myself. We’ll give her another one.’ She’d have probably sung it better, but it is too good for me not to do it.
270
This was in June, 1866. Frank wrote for me to come to him at once, and although my own wound was still very bad, I started immediately and stayed with him at the house of Mr. Alexander Severe, in Nelson county, until he recovered, which was in September.
271
Twitter is so short, it’s safe. I don’t want my bosses to be like, ‘Hey, your script is due and we saw you wrote four blog pages.’
272
I wrote probably my phattest banging record with Knife Party: ‘Pile Driver.’
273
As soon as I was old enough to drive, I got a job at a local newspaper. There was someone who influenced me. He wrote a column for The Guardian from this tiny village in India.
274
One of the people that wrote a forward to my book is Gerry Spence, whom I admire. Gerry is a friend of mine, and Gerry’s perhaps the leading criminal defense attorney in the country.
275
‘Superman’ had nothing to do with the superhero or physical power. It’s a reference to the book ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra,’ by Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote about the evolution of consciousness to reach a higher superman state.
276
Marx and Lenin were ahead of their time. Marx wrote before offshoring of jobs and the financialization of the economy. Lenin presided over a communist revolution that jumped the gun by taking place in a country in which feudal elements still predominated over capitalism.
277
I do sometimes look back at things I’ve written in the past, and think, ‘I just don’t remember being the person who wrote that.’
278
How do I let the director know how obsessed I am and willing to do anything for the movie? Like, I wanted to write this one director a letter, so I wrote him a handwritten note. But then I was like, ‘How many people are writing this guy handwritten letters? Is it going to seem cheesy? What do I do?’
279
My first real break was when my college sketch troupe, The State, was asked to contribute pieces for a new MTV show called ‘You Wrote It, You Watch It.’
280
Look, in 1800 the sainted Thomas Jefferson arranged to hire a notorious slanderer named James Callender, who worked as a writer at a Republican newspaper in Richmond, Va. Read some of what he wrote about John Adams. This was a personal slander.
281
I wrote the first book, and I thought people would say: ‘Separate and unequal schools in the City of Boston? I didn’t know that. Let’s go out and fix it.’
282
I don’t really have a writing process. I don’t write at all but, honestly, I feel like it’s a modern-day writing because everything is technology and if I go in there and freestyle and I keep it, I feel like I wrote that. If I go in there and fix it, it’s almost like something I wrote.
283
I wrote ‘My Teeth Hurt’ in April 2018 when my teeth hurt and I didn’t have dental insurance.
284
I always wrote poetry as a teenager and it was always so dark, but it made me feel good to get it out.
285
My father has a book where, ever since I started playing games… he wrote down the games that I played in. And then, when I did my website, we thought that was a really good idea, that people can keep track of my games.
286
The only joy I had was writing what was. That book was. It no longer amuses me to be all the things I was when I wrote that. But it is my story as I was then.
287
When they wrote the Constitution, only white male landowners had the right to vote.
288
The songs of Bizet are by a French peer of Rossini. When Rossini stopped composing, he was living in Paris. He also wrote some beautiful songs in French.
289
I was very, very religious. And of course I wrote about it in ‘Night.’ I questioned God’s silence. So I questioned. I don’t have an answer for that. Does it mean that I stopped having faith? No. I have faith, but I question it.
290
The U.S. basically wrote the rules and created the institutions of globalisation.
291
I am glad that I wrote something that brought joy to millions of people.
292
I wrote speculative fiction because I loved to read it, and thought I could do better than some of the people who were getting published.
293
I wrote my first real murder story as a journalist for the Daytona Beach News Journal in 1980. It was about a body found in the woods. Later, the murder was linked to a serial killer who was later caught and executed for his crimes.
294
I have only read very classic traditional English ghost stories, other than Henry James, who wrote some magnificent short ones as well as the longer ‘Turn of the Screw.’ He, Dickens, and M.R. James are my influences.
295
When we wrote ‘Next Girl,’ I was like, ‘Wait a minute, this is what I always wanted to do.’
296
It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.
297
Well just meeting J. K. Rowling was amazing because she created all this world. And all the fans, we all get so obsessed with it and then you met the one person who made it all up. It was just so amazing. And I was just so amazed that that she wrote this book and all of the films have happened.
298
In my twenties and early thirties, I wrote three novels, but beginning in my late thirties, I wearied of the mechanics of fiction writing, got interested in collage nonfiction, and have been writing literary collage ever since.
299
I was always writing for myself. I wrote what I needed to write and hear – that’s what makes it powerful.
300
My paintings have gotten to be pretty popular and I’ve taken a little bit more interest in painting the last few years. In fact, my novel that I wrote not too long ago, ‘The Hornet’s Nest,’ I painted the cover picture for it and I do a good bit of painting now.
301
I never kept a diary, but I wrote detailed notes of my travels.
302
I always wrote; my first story was published in the magazine The American Girl when I was 11.
303
I wrote a techno song after I was deported. I was in America for a little bit, but then I was deported back to Germany. I was very sad.
304
The past actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down.
305
I write when the urge hits me, getting the words down as fast as I can type and then I step back from what I just wrote and start a dialectical process where I begin challenging my own writing.
306
I had no idea what I was doing when I wrote ‘Search.’ There was no carefully designed work plan. There was no theory that I was out to prove.
307
With the Truman book, I wrote the entire account of his experiences in World War I before going over to Europe to follow his tracks in the war. When I got there, there was a certain satisfaction in finding I had it right – it does look like that.
308
I wrote the worst novel ever.
309
If you’ve read a lot of vintage science fiction, as I have at one time or another in my life, you can’t help but realise how wrong we get it. I have gotten it wrong more times than I’ve gotten it right. But I knew that when I started; I knew that before I wrote a word of science fiction.
310
I wrote my first play when I was eight.
311
I wrote in the ‘War of Art’ that I could divide my life neatly into two parts: before turning pro and after. After is better.
312
I invented animals and birds – I had about two dozen. After working on them for six months, I sat down and just for fun wrote two dozen poems to accompany the drawings. It was for no one to every see, but a friend sent me in to an editor.
313
When people know I wrote ‘Thelma and Louise,’ they don’t want to mess with me.
314
I grew up in a working-class Catholic family in south Louisiana. I went to a state university. I taught literature, wrote a novel that was the novel I wanted to write, and got a couple of good reviews but no real traction. I had no idea how to get a job in TV.
315
I wrote poems in my corner of the Brooks Street station. I sent them to two editors who rejected them right off. I read those letters of rejection years later and I agreed with those editors.
316
One of my favorite songs is ‘Ghost’ by Indigo Girls. Emily Saliers wrote that, and she is one of the most talented songwriters ever.
317
You made a lot of mistakes, and you wrote a lot of crap. But it was all part of the learning process.
318
If you wrote a novel in South Africa which didn’t concern the central issues, it wouldn’t be worth publishing.
319
Hair is also a problem. I remember once, when I was reporting from Beirut at the height of the civil war, someone wrote in to the BBC complaining about my appearance.
320
If I want people to connect to my words and my stories, I need to tell them where they came from. Because then, when you break into song, they have kind of a blueprint for why I wrote that song, so they can come to it with something they went through that helps them connect to it.
321
More than 25 miles off the coast of Massachusetts and only 14 miles long, Nantucket is, as Herman Melville wrote in ‘Moby-Dick,’ ‘away off shore.’
322
The fate of the singers who, like my songs, went up in flame was also the fate of the books which I later wrote. All of them went up in flame to Heaven in a fire which broke out one night at my home in Bad Homburg as I lay ill in a hospital.
323
To me, Mozart is our Shakespeare, the one who wrote the most dramatic, psychologically most baffling music. He combined ideas that no one else would have thought of putting together.
324
Shakespeare and his work will always be relevant. He wrote those pieces hundreds of years ago and we haven’t really changed as humans, have we? We have to deal with love, honour and adultery now – people were the same then, too – that’s what’s so wonderful and powerful.
325
I wanted to share my doubts and my culinary, amorous, and cosmic experiences. So I wrote ‘Like Water for Chocolate,’ which is merely the reflection of who I am as a woman, a wife, a mother, a daughter.
326
I’ve written on public matters, but I don’t understand how anyone could tout me as a possible poet laureate when I wrote a poem on the abdication of King Charles III or about the sex life of the Royals… anybody who knew my work would know I’m not a contender.
327
Before trying a novel I wrote a couple of plays.
328
My earlier poems were sadder than my poems are today, perhaps because I wrote them in confusion or when I was unhappy. But I am not a melancholy person, quite the contrary, no one enjoys laughing more than I do.
329
When I wrote the lyrics, melodies, and the first themes of ‘Serendipity,’ I tried to come up with some rare things you find in life, something very special, like the calico, three-striped cat; things that have extraordinary meanings in people’s lives.
330
I’ve always said, since I got to know him and wrote about him, that he’s the generation he least appeals to is his own and I think in many ways he was born middle-aged and that’s become apparent in recent years.
331
In my late teenage years, I developed a real passion for it, and wrote a lot of poetry.
332
I was around computers from birth; we had one of the first Macs, which came out shortly before I was born, and my dad ran a company that wrote computer operating systems. I don’t think I have any particular technical skills; I just got a really large head start.
333
John Muir, the famous naturalist, wrote in his journal that you should never go to Alaska as a young man because you’ll never be satisfied with any other place as long as you live. And there’s a lot of truth to that.
334
I think the narratives on ‘Trans,’ ‘Plans,’ and ‘Narrow Stairs’ moved away from the way I wrote on the first couple of records, which was a lot more impressionistic. I was writing those songs in my early 20s, so I thought I was being more clear than I actually was.
335
The first set of lyrics for the first songs I ever wrote, which are the ones on ‘Pretty Hate Machine,’ came from private journal entries that I realized I was writing in lyric form.
336
Oh yeah, I was one of the first guys writing comic books, I wrote Captain America, with guys like Stan Lee, who became famous later on with Marvel Comics.
337
I did write more mainstream stuff with DK. But you could always tell the records that I wrote in contrast with everybody else’s because the format was a bit different. The harmonies were used in a different type of way. Way more metaphors in the mix.
338
I do not mind having written the song at all. I just wish that I had written it in a different key, as the high d is hard to play. I am glad that I wrote something that brought joy to millions of people.
339
Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. I wouldn’t say that I’m a travel novelist but rather a novelist who travels – and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places.
340
I tweet myself and do all the Facebook updates. It started off with me wondering whether I was showing off and I was very careful about what I wrote.
341
But I would like to think that it’s the actor that makes the difference in these cases. Not the director, not the guy that wrote the book, not the guy that adapted it for the screen, but the actor.
342
In the beginning, we had a great deal of freedom, and Jerry wrote completely out of his imagination – very, very freely. We even had no editorial supervision to speak of, because they were in such a rush to get the thing in before deadline. But later on we were restricted.
343
The Founders didn’t mention political parties when they wrote the Constitution, and George Washington in essence warned us against them in his Farewell Address.
344
Only to he avoid misunderstandings, I must say that even last year, when I wrote my pamphlet, I heartily wished that Prussia should declare war against Napoleon.
345
I wrote my epitaph: He started out a particle and ended up a wave.
346
I believe that the Framers of the Constitution made their intent clear when they wrote the First Amendment. I believe they wanted to keep the new government from endorsing one religion over another, not erase the public consciousness or common faith.
347
I suppose that one of the reasons I wrote ‘In Contempt’ was because of the money. After the trial I came to realize that there were things that I needed to do if I was to protect myself and my family, so there were some selfish reasons for it.
348
Many voters think about the makeup of the Supreme Court when they are choosing a president. The justices deal not only with constitutional issues but also with social issues that were unknown to the founding fathers who wrote the Constitution more than 200 years ago.
349
People have said things about me, and wrote and criticized me about things in the past, but it goes in one ear and out the other.
350
I wrote ‘Kshana Kshanam’ with the one and only purpose of impressing Sridevi. ‘Kshana Kshanam’ was my love letter to her.
351
What’s funny about Jesus’ Son is that I never even wrote that book, I just wrote it down. I would tell these stories and people would say, You should write these things down.
352
It’s just that what’s important there is different there than what’s important is here. Here, people care that you wrote a book or that you work in the media.
353
My sister and I wrote some songs together under a project called Sala Says Mhyp when I was 17. Sala is our cat. She died, and we wanted to do something in honor of our her. We were a proper cat family.
354
I just fell in love with his music. I thought Yanni was Japanese. I didn’t have any idea what a Yanni was. I just thought I was in love with a Japanese man who wrote beautiful music.
355
I didn’t finish the stories until we went to the Philippines and I got malaria. I couldn’t work and I didn’t have any money, but I had seven stories. So I wrote three or four more.
356
Recently, lobbyists for the pharmaceutical industry wrote a prescription drug bill that increased their profits and did nothing to help seniors. The result: seniors are stuck with a confusing prescription drug plan that does little to help them with their costs.
357
It was only as I wrote about it that I began to find paths of access to feelings that were intolerable to me then.
358
If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.
359
I’ve known those pieces ever since I was about 16 or 17; I also at that time was taken to meet Charles Ives whom I got to know fairly well. He was the one who wrote a recommendation for me to get into college.
360
The first song I wrote was called ‘Here I Go Falling In Love’ I wrote it in the sixth grade.
361
If you’re writing an opinion piece, it’s your job to write your opinion. If, on the other hand, you wrote a novel, as Virginia Woolf tells us, it would be inappropriate if you let your novel be influenced by your political opinions.
362
I wrote as a very angry young man, believing he was going to be killed in a world war.
363
Interpreter of Maladies is the title of one of the stories in the book. And the phrase itself was something I thought of before I even wrote that story.
364
I wrote most of these songs right before the end. A lot of these songs are about that. Even if it’s not direct, you can feel the beginning of the end of the breakup in these songs.
365
Right before I got ‘Sons of Anarchy,’ I actually quit acting for 18 months and didn’t read a single script, and I wrote a film. I felt like I needed to do something that I had control over, as an artist, and also just do something where I felt like I had some control over my life, as just a human, out in the world.
366
I was five years old when I wrote my first song. It was out of longing for my father that I wrote it.
367
I guess if I wrote a book one day, it would be about hair.
368
I know that many writers have had to write under censorship and yet produced good novels; for instance, Cervantes wrote Don Quixote under Catholic censorship.
369
See, I never wrote arrangements for the band for Judy Garland; I did strictly special material, special lyrics, put together all of her medleys.
370
My daughter was two weeks old when I wrote ‘White Wine in the Sun.’ I can remember just sobbing and having to leave the room.
371
My favorite song that I wrote is ‘Love Line.’ This was my first song that I wrote lyrics for, and I really wanted to express the feeling when you’re in love and hoping the other person feels the same way.
372
I’m So Sorry’ is probably one of my favorite songs that I’ve written… I wrote it very quickly and confidently. And then I didn’t question it.
373
And one of the reasons that I wrote the cook books was so that I could be at home more than being on the road.
374
I always wrote poems when I was a little girl, and I loved hip hop music, and I kind of just started writing poems over beats, and that’s when I started rapping.
375
I don’t think I wrote my first song until I was 25. And then everything I wrote ended up becoming my first album. I put my music online, and from that, things just happened.
376
I wrote ‘My Name is Red’ just to remember painting, where the hand does it before the intellect. When I’m captive to it, I’m a happier person. Kierkegaard tells us that a happy person is someone who lives in the present; the unhappy person, someone who lives either in the past or the future.
377
I wrote because I needed to and wanted to. It never occurred to me that I’d become famous.
378
Back in high school, I wrote a novel about a character named Bart Simpson. I thought it was a very unusual name for a kid at the time. I had this idea of an angry father yelling ‘Bart,’ and Bart sounds kind of like bark – like a barking dog.
379
My Brilliant Career was beautifully directed, but I had a bit of trouble with myself in it. It was a silly script, based on a book this 16-year-old girl wrote.
380
I get so excited when a song I wrote that’s very personal to me goes No. 1 and I look down and see people singing the words back to me.
381
I wrote ‘Aadukalam’ keeping Dhanush in mind. As an actor, he delivers exactly what I need and sometimes more.
382
Around 1967 Dan Bobrow wrote a program to do algebra problems based on symbols rather than numbers.
383
There was Uncle Ken of mine about whom I wrote a lot of stories. I can always write stories about uncles and aunts and distant relatives. They have to be distant, though; otherwise, you’ll be in trouble.
384
Of course I danced a lot when I was making ‘Swingers.’ The swing music scene was big in Hollywood, and I went to places like The Derby. And, after I wrote it and was trying to get it made, I would go every week so I’d be good at dancing.
385
I had bohemian parents in Seattle in the last ’60s living in a houseboat. My dad wrote science fiction novels and painted big murals and oil paintings.
386
When I was eight or nine, I wrote a new version of ‘Peter Pan’ for the school play. They didn’t use it – I imagine it was unperformable – but as recompense for not doing my script, I was offered any role, and instinctively went for Captain Hook. I came on trying to be terrifying, but everyone laughed at me.
387
For years, I believed that anything worth doing was worth doing early. In graduate school, I submitted my dissertation two years in advance. In college, I wrote my papers weeks early and finished my thesis four months before the due date. My roommates joked that I had a productive form of obsessive-compulsive disorder.
388
I write to be truthful in my songs, which is why I wrote what’s painfully truthful about my life in my autobiography.
389
To have a songwriter that wrote so specifically what I felt to be true… I’ve never been much of an actor either. If something is real for me, then I can do it.
390
Morrissey wrote a really gorgeous song for me. I’m crazy for that man. And he thinks I’m hip!
391
I only published my first novel at the age of 40. Till then, I wrote short stories.
392
Kickback is a police thriller which I wrote. I’m very proud of it. I did it in two parts for France because when I wrote it, there wasn’t the audience demand for crime stuff that there is now.
393
As far as I’m concerned, ‘The Caretaker’ is funny up to a point. Beyond that, it ceases to be funny, and it was because of that point that I wrote it.
394
That’s what George wrote! He wrote it. Why change it? There was this European company that I was speaking about awhile ago – course, didn’t nobody know what Porgy was.
395
I wrote ‘Love Foolish,’ and when I heard the music for the first time, it felt like this was a song that Twice hadn’t done before. I thought the song and music had a very mature tone, so I wrote the lyrics to match. I was inspired by the music directly.
396
A lot of women wrote to me. Some wrote me long letters on the meaning of the circle and about mythology and about motherhood and the significance or the symbolism of the mermaid and the frogs and the turtles.
397
It shouldn’t be a Higgs field. If it’s anybody’s, it should be Goldstone field, I think. When Nambu wrote his short paper in 1960, Jeffrey Goldstone of Cambridge University, who was visiting Cern, heard about it. He then wrote a paper which was conceptually similar to what Nambu had done, but a simpler model.
398
Remember that I wrote a pavane for a dead princess, and not a dead pavane for a princess!
399
But the law of God came from heaven indeed. God wrote it with his finger, it is the fountain of all wisdom, and therefore shall it continue for ever, and never have an end.
400
I looked through our catalog year by year, and I saw that there were pockets of time when we wrote some terrific songs. Then all of a sudden, we’d go for another two or three months and there weren’t great songs.
401
I probably wrote three-quarters of the songs without an instrument in my hands.
402
I wrote, exercised, ate healthy, and responded to life in prison very well.
403
The first book I ever wrote was in fourth grade and it was called ‘Billy’s Booger.’ It was an autobiographical piece about a kid who was really bad at math.
404
I wrote a screenplay for a ‘Sweet Valley High’ adaptation, and it’s really amazing to me how many women who are my age have responded to the idea and are excited about the movie.
405
Great dad. Yeah, he would ask me for money on birthdays and, you know, inappropriate times. And I just wrote him off like, ‘You’re not a father.’ I just learned you cannot emotionally invest in people who are not attainable.
406
I’m astonished by my success. I wrote because I needed to and wanted to. It never occurred to me that I’d become famous.
407
I always sang standards because the songs I wrote for myself weren’t as easy to sing.
408
Whites were the winners, blacks were the losers, we wrote the history books, and they didn’t feature.
409
I wrote Steve Carell’s last episode. I think it was a really good episode, but there’s always a tension between what’s good for the series and what’s good for an episode, because the more closure you put on an episode, the more significant feeling it is.
410
‘Rednecks’ always made me nervous to play, but I’m glad I wrote it and I continue to play it. It’s just that the language is so rough.
411
I don’t think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.
412
There are stories still in existence that I wrote when I was five. However, I did not get published until I was seven.
413
Epic started out with scripting languages in the first generation of the Unreal engine in 1998. I wrote that. There’s a place in my heart that comes along with the simplicity of programming in a scripting language.
414
I knew at the time that that wasn’t the part I would be doing, they just wanted a screentest so they could have a look at it to show to the directors and producers. Then they wrote a part for me or maybe they already had it in mind, I don’t know.
415
And we had our own laws. I mean, I wrote them. And we had our own customs, and traditions, and proprieties.
416
Here is the difference between Dante, Milton, and me. They wrote about hell and never saw the place. I wrote about Chicago after looking the town over for years and years.
417
When I read Andrew Motion’s biography, I wept. It’s something about the purity of the story and how fresh it was because of the love letters Keats wrote.
418
When I started out, I wrote the songs, recorded the songs, mastered, mixed, did the artwork, made the packaging and did the distribution, all myself. Now I understand what everyone’s jobs are, who is doing them right, and who isn’t.
419
Steve produced Girls Grow Up Faster Than Boys and one more. Then he and I wrote a few songs together and became good friends. He was a talented producer.
420
Sir Walter, with his 61 years of life, although he never wrote a novel until he was over 40, had, fortunately for the world, a longer working career than most of his brethren.
421
Yea, I wrote my college thesis on why college athletes should get paid. I think there’s a way to do it based on the amount of revenue they generate.
422
In my final year at Bristol University, I wrote a play called ‘White Feathers.’ It was produced in the studio theatre at the students’ union in early 1999, when I was 21. It’s 100 pages long: a very traditional play, with an interval, about deserters in the First World War.
423
It was that famous joke: What’s the last thing the drummer said before he got kicked out of the band? ‘Hey, I wrote a song.’
424
I wrote ‘Mistress of Spices’ at an unusual time when I had a near-death experience after the birth of my second son.
425
I just wrote a book, but don’t go out and buy it yet, because I don’t think it’s finished yet.
426
Madly, futilely, I wrote novel after novel, eight in all, that failed to find a publisher. I persisted because for me the novel was the supreme literary form – not just one among many, not a relic of the past, but the way we communicate to one another the subtlest truths about this business of living.
427
I wrote a few children’s books… not on purpose.
428
I heard about the book and I said, ‘Oh my god, I’ve got to read this book,’ and I didn’t know that a white woman wrote it. Nobody said that to me, they just said, ‘The Help – Oh my god, you’ve got to read it.’ Everyone failed to mention it was a white woman, I think, because nobody really wants to talk about race.
429
In 2003, I wrote a New York Times best-seller called ‘Shut Up & Sing,’ in which I criticized celebrities like the Dixie Chicks & Barbra Streisand who were trashing then-President George W. Bush. I have used a variation of that title for more than 15 years to respond to performers who sound off on politics.
430
When I was a teenager, I thought how great it would be if only I could write novels in English. I had the feeling that I would be able to express my emotions so much more directly than if I wrote in Japanese.
431
I wrote several articles criticizing psychoanalysis, but the analysts weren’t listening to my objections. So I finally quit after practicing it for six years.
432
When I first wrote for orchestra, I didn’t realize, when you have 20 people playing a violin line, that is very different than one person playing that line.
433
My brother used to say that I wrote faster than he could read. He wrote two books – of poems – better than all mine put together.
434
I really don’t feel that any of the pieces I wrote were confessions; there are no revelations about secrets in my life, and actually I have nothing to confess and I certainly do not ask for redemption and there is no reward for confessing that I expect.
435
When I wrote ‘Before The Dawn,’ I made it quite clear that there are lots of people involved in my life who I can’t talk about simply because I’d put them at risk.
436
I did not write it. God wrote it. I merely did his dictation.
437
What I like best is a book that’s at least funny once in a while. What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.
438
From 1999 on – until 2003 – I covered publishing in a weekly column for Wired.com and wrote for several other publications – altogether writing over 150 articles.
439
For what I wrote that started this whole controversy, I deserved to be criticized, and I felt bad about writing it. I felt bad mainly as a writer and a thinker.
440
You promised to take care of me and not to turn your back on me. How is it possible that you never wrote to me even once and you never came back to see me? Do you think that it is fun for me to spend months, even years, without any news, without any hope!
441
I wrote Murder at the Windmill. And it was accepted and we made it and it was the first film I made with Danny Angel, well the only film I actually made… I made a lot of it at the Windmill itself.
442
My older sister encouraged me from early on and bought me one of the first guitars I had. She listened to all of the crappy songs that I wrote when I was 8 years old and encouraged me to keep doing it.
443
I wrote an essay about leaf blowers and the evil they do.
444
The Room I wrote in 1957, and I was really gratified to find that it stood up. I didn’t have to change a word.
445
When I wrote my book I wanted to love someone. I wanted to be in love. Now I know that I shall never be in love – and I no longer wish to be.
446
I saw the Village as a place you could escape to, to express yourself. When I first went there, I wrote and performed poetry. Then I drew portraits for a couple of years. It took a while before I thought about picking up a guitar.
447
I’ve written a song for Prince. I never showed it to Prince, but just to see if I could do it. At the time, when I sort of knew him, he was recording a song a day. I wondered if I could do that. So I wrote it.
448
One of the things I’ve always liked about my husband is he’s very good at lots of stuff. He was an English teacher when I met him. He wrote poetry and played the guitar. As time went on, he decided to go into economics, so he’s very analytical and mathematical in addition to his artsy side.
449
I wrote a novel about Israelis who live their own lives on the slope of a volcano. Near a volcano one still falls in love, one still gets jealous, one still wants a promotion, one still gossips.
450
I wrote ‘Buried Child’ in a trailer at an old ranch house we had in California.
451
This book was company for me – I wrote these things when I was in hotels, far from where I normally live. I never intended to publish it.
452
And now it looks like I’m probably going to shoot a movie that I wrote. I got the money to do it, and I would star and all, because of being on Howard.
453
When I sat down and wrote the first paragraph, I was like, ‘Oh, I can go with this.’ I didn’t do an outline. I didn’t do anything. I just wrote sentence by sentence, not knowing where the story was going.
454
When I was very young, I used to share much of what I wrote with my family, but as I got older and more self-conscious, it became a much more private process.
455
At ‘SNL,’ I wrote political stuff, but I never felt the show should have an axe to grind. But when I left in ’95, I could let my own beliefs out.
456
I’ve been campaigning like anything for restoring these changes. For 27 years. I wrote a book about it, well, a portion of the book was devoted to these scenes and why they should have been in the movie.
457
It’s a weird thing. Rick Springfield wrote ‘Jessie’s Girl,’ and he probably gets sick of talking about ‘Jessie’s Girl.’ The thing is, I didn’t write ‘Blurred Lines.’ I didn’t direct the music video. I’m really happy for the success, but it is kind of a funny thing to follow me around.
458
The universe is a symphony of strings, and the mind of God that Einstein eloquently wrote about for thirty years would be cosmic music resonating through eleven-dimensional hyper space.
459
If you are feeling something, then Shakespeare felt it and wrote about it – and wrote about it so eloquently.
460
I’ve had three novels published, and I was working a little bit in theater in Ireland. I wrote one film script just to see what it would turn out like.
461
TV’s hard work. I don’t know how the hell Angela Lansbury survived doing ‘Murder, She Wrote’ all those years. And sure, everyone wants to be Bruce Willis or George Clooney – they want to be in film for the range of characters you get to play.
462
Yeah I do and I don’t mind, in fact that is one of the real encouraging things about this whole career of mine is that there are tunes I wrote almost thirty years ago that I will still play in front of an audience and I still like the old tunes.
463
In ’57, I got a job at the Blue Angel nightclub, and a gentleman named Ken Welch wrote all my material for me. I lived at a place called the Rehearsal Club that was actually the basis for a play called Stage Door.
464
I was a 16-year-old girl at one point, so of course I wrote poetry.
465
I started writing seriously when I was 18, wrote my first novel when I was 22, and I’ve never stopped writing since.
466
‘Extraordinary’ is an original fairy tale, a contemporary story. But like a traditional fairy tale, it heads quickly into frightening, bloody territory. I am afraid for my book, as it goes out alone into the world, just as I was frightened for Phoebe as I wrote and rewrote her story.
467
The first newspaper I worked on was the ‘Springfield Union’ in Springfield, Massachusetts. I wrote over a hundred letters to newspapers asking for work and got three responses, two no’s.
468
Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.
469
I never wrote. I also never really thought about being an actor. But when it was time to go to high school, we couldn’t afford private school, so I tried out for all the special schools in New York.
470
Initially, I’d written a normal love song. Later, I wrote Corona Kannala.’ I say cheesy because we used a lot of contemporary references.
471
I wrote ‘Happy Man’ with a couple of boys of mine. I have been writing in Nashville for a long time. Of course I was writing songs back in Oklahoma when I was a kid.
472
None of the atrocities in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ are pure fiction. Everything Margaret wrote was something that has happened somewhere in the world to human beings.
473
There’s the Bacon society, which is fostered by his fourth wife Helen Bacon, but I don’t know what kind of performances his music gets. He wrote symphonic music and some chorale music.
474
I wrote that song for my wife, and it’s what some guy who’s sitting under a tree would be singing to the woman of his life, telling her how wonderful she is. To me, that’s more lasting than something that sounds like it belongs on a movie soundtrack.
475
The tune ‘All My Friends,’ we recorded because our friend who wrote the song, Scott Boyer, passed way, and Gregg Allman had passed and he had recorded the song on his first solo record.
476
I didn’t think anything I wrote was going to get published. I’m a dyslexic kid who had tutors through college. But I had a very strong impulse to write.
477
If I wrote a musical it wouldn’t be about me. Although I do some magic, so it would probably be about a magician who appeared and re-appeared all over the place.
478
The history of exploration has never been driven by exploration. But Columbus himself was a discoverer. So was Magellan. But the people who wrote checks were not. They had other motivations.
479
I tried, after I wrote ‘Twilight,’ to read ‘The Historian,’ because it was the big thing that summer. But I can’t read other people’s vampires. If it’s too close, I get upset; if it’s too far away, I get upset. It just makes me very neurotic.
480
Mozart often wrote to his family that certain variations or sections of pieces were so successful that they had to be encored immediately, even without waiting for the entire piece to end.
481
I write short stories, and I wrote a play.
482
I wrote songs with the guys from Air Supply for their record… So I was just writing songs.
483
I taught workshops at universities. I wrote for magazines. This took time and insane amounts of juggling, but it’s how I earned a living.
484
That’s why I wrote this book: to show how these people can imbue us with hope. I read somewhere that when a person takes part in community action, his health improves. Something happens to him or to her biologically. It’s like a tonic.
485
I wrote a query letter to an editor – a friend of a friend. The editor called me an idiot, told me never to contact an editor directly, and then recommended three literary agents he had worked with before. Laurie Fox was one of them, and I’ve never looked back.
486
Well I guess my music came to prominence around one piece called ‘In C’ which I wrote in 1964 at that time it was called ‘The Global Villages for Symphonic Pieces’, because it was a piece built out of 53 simple patterns and the structure was new to music at that time.
487
When I wrote the eight fairy tales that appear in ‘Horse, Flower, Bird’ I was working toward a completely new form of artistic expression, trying to create a new kind of tale that also felt vintage: innocent and childlike, but haunted. I tried to write a picture-less picture book.
488
I did not feel ‘evil’ when I wrote advertisements for Puerto Rico. They helped attract industry and tourists to a country which had been living on the edge of starvation for 400 years.
489
‘Halo’ I wrote with my grandpa in his nursing home. When I went to visit him, he’d often comment on my halo. But of course, I couldn’t see. And he always – he had pictures of Jesus with these beautiful halos. And so I asked him if he’d write a song with me about Jesus’ halo.
490
But at the time when he wrote, Englishmen, with the rarest exceptions, wrote only in French or Latin; and when they began to write in English, a man of genius, to interpret and improve on him, was not found for a long time.
491
I would love to have a song that I wrote by myself to win a ‘Song of the Year’ award.
492
I brought my personality and sense of wonder and I think they wrote as much of my personality as they could. I do not go around kicking butt and saving the universe all the time but they tried to capture me as best as they could in the character.
493
Well, I came the second year. I mean I just fit right in. They wrote a great person and I’m so lucky that I got to be part of the family.
494
What is a seemingly conservative Englishman doing, leading the world in the mastery of a classically Spanish instrument? Debussy wrote some of the best Spanish music, and the only time he was ever in the country, he saw a bullfight which made him ill.
495
People like Frank Zappa and Bryan Ferry knew we could pick and choose from the history of music, stick things together looking for friction and energy. They were more like playwrights; they invented characters and wrote a life around them.
496
As soon as I finished the first book, I wrote a second, which I hope to sell this year, and I have just about finished the third book in the series. Two more are already outlined. I’m in this for the long haul.
497
I’m a strong nonbeliever in the Christmas letter where you don’t really read it because it’s just full of kind of meaningless information. It doesn’t really resonate to the person reading it, but it means so much to the person that wrote it.
498
I have written a few children’s books. The first book that I wrote was for children. It was called ‘The Package’, and it was a mystery story in pictures. It had no words.
499
‘Mama I’m Coming Home’ is one song that I think is incredible. One of his best songs ever written. Lemmy wrote the lyrics to that.
500
I don’t remember writing anything until I wrote my college application.
501
We fought during ‘The Wall,’ which was an album Waters wrote, based on his family story, we clashed long before that, during the period of the Dark Side and ‘Wish You Were Here.’ Actually, we never got along.
502
When I wrote ‘Lean In,’ some people argue that I did not spend enough time writing about the difficulties women face when they don’t have a partner. They were right.
503
I have to make myself write, sometimes. In the space between poems, you somehow forget how to do it, where to begin. It was good to be task – based for a while. I just came downstairs each day, picked the one I was going to do that day, and wrote.
504
I think I settled on the title before I ever wrote the book.
505
When I wrote ‘Fast Food My Way’ in 2004, I hoped that my friends would prepare my recipes. Now, more people cook from that book than any other I’ve written in the past 30 years.
506
I wrote on a show called Johnny Bravo when I was at Hanna-Barbera.
507
I didn’t write any music at all, and then, I remember Jon Anderson being very insistent saying that there were two kinds of musicians: the ones who wrote music and the ones who didn’t.
508
I got this idea about being afraid to let go of something and being afraid of sinking into a state of almost anesthesia, where you have to trust other people. Just the paranoia of it all. And it seemed to suit the frenetic track. So I just wrote it out and, you know, said it.
509
If I wrote in a sonnet form, I would be distorting. Or if I had some great new idea for line breaks and I used it in a poem, but it’s really not right for that poem, but I wanted it, that would be distorting.
510
I know not, sir, whether Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare, but if he did not, it seems to me that he missed the opportunity of his life.
511
I wrote that letter, and the one to Nixon. And I wrote more letters, and I thought it might be a magazine article. At that time I sent it to Esquire and Playboy, but anyway, I kept writing, and all of sudden I had enough and thought, well maybe it is a book.
512
Right when I moved to L.A., I started writing. I wrote some screenplay. I’m sure it’s terrible. But I wrote a screenplay by myself. When I first moved to L.A., I had no friends. I didn’t know anybody. I just sat in a little studio apartment, and I wrote a screenplay.
513
I wish I was a prolific writing wondrous boy genius – I wish I was Stevie Wonder – but I wasn’t. I was me. I wrote terrible songs about girls I was head-over-heels about. As soon as a pretty girl looks at me, that’s it – I’m in love, and I should probably write a song about it!
514
For me, how I feel about what I wrote down turns into a song.
515
Larry only ever wrote one song, and he wrote that with Tony Kaye, I think it was, from Yes.
516
All my editors since Malcolm Cowley have had instructions to leave my prose exactly as I wrote it. In the days of Malcolm Cowley, with ‘On the Road’ and ‘The Dharma Bums’, I had no power to stand by my style for better or for worse.
517
I suppose not everyone has a dad who wrote a book saying he didn’t believe in the Parliamentary road to socialism.
518
I was one of those dark, quiet kids that wrote poetry.
519
I first wrote for adults, but when I started writing for young people, it was the most creative and liberating experience of my life. I was able to express my own deepest feelings far more than I ever could when writing for adults.
520
If all I ever wrote about was inner city freaks, I think it would be dishonest.
521
I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.
522
What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.
523
I first became aware of the delights of the natural world when my father, an entomologist, presented me with what looked like a twig. When it got up and walked, my delight was such that I wrote a poem, ‘To a Walking Stick.’
524
I never thought what I wrote was good enough to be published. I thought of myself as completely detached from that constellation of real writers. It was completely for myself.
525
I was really inspired while I was pregnant and I wrote a whole album for my baby. I wanted to write a kids album that didn’t annoy parents. I used The Beatles ‘Rocky Raccoon’ as sort of a starting place for my writing.
526
The first comedy screenplay that I wrote was Animal House and I always thought I could and should be a director but no one was about to give me that opportunity on Animal House.
527
I was separated from my wife at the time. A lot of people think I wrote it about prison.
528
Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.
529
I wrote songs all my life, where anyone wanted to hear them or not.
530
I lost my son in late 2011. He had been totally incapacitated from his neck down for the last eight years of his life, but his mind was alive and brilliant in those years. He even wrote a book, ‘Allegheny Mountain,’ lying at home in his hospital bed.
531
I wrote a lot of stuff quickly: pages and pages of notes that seemed pretty incoherent at first. Most of it was taken from the radio because -suddenly being a parent- I’d be confronted by the radio giving a news report every hour of the day.
532
The songs are about things that we were thinking and we wrote ’em down, and when you listen to ’em, whatever you think it’s about… THAT’S what it’s about!
533
About a year ago, out of the blue, I just wrote a bunch of songs.
534
When I realized I wanted to do more writing and less traveling around the world teaching live seminars, I decided to write the first ‘Chicken Soup for the Soul(R)’ book. I knew I wanted to have 100 stories in the book, so I wrote or edited two stories a week for a year.
535
When I wrote the song, I had the sea near Bombay in mind. We stayed at a hotel by the sea, and the fishermen come up at five in the morning and they were all chanting. And we went on the beach and we got chased by a mad dog – big as a donkey.
536
An English journalist called Michael Viney told me when I was 25, that I would write well if I cared a lot what I was writing about. That worked. I went home that day and wrote about parents not understanding their children as well as we teachers did, and it was published the very next week.
537
Armenian folklore has it that three apples fell from Heaven: one for the teller of a story, one for the listener, and the third for the one who ‘took it to heart.’ What a pity Heaven awarded no apple to the one who wrote the story down.
538
Somebody wrote a script around us, but Dustin Abraham came with the best one.
539
My writing improved the more I wrote – and the more I read good writing, from Shakespeare on down.
540
I wrote ‘The Blue Sweater’ to inspire more people to become engaged in working to solve the problems of global poverty.
541
As a kid, I liked making up stories, and I wrote a story about a kangaroo and a bat with Christy Chang, and she went on to become a surgeon.
542
I was willing to do anything that Chris Carter wrote.
543
I undertake the same project as Montaigne, but with an aim contrary to his own: for he wrote his Essays only for others, and I write my reveries only for myself.
544
If I don’t relate to a song, I won’t sing it. The thing is that if I wrote it, I’m always going to relate to it.
545
I was sad Jon Ronson, who wrote in the Guardian and has made a TV show for Channel 4, took against me.
546
I was born with a silver microphone in my mouth, and that was an advantage. My father wrote books and was also a great broadcaster.
547
‘The Things They Carried’ is labeled right inside the book as a work of fiction, but I did set out when I wrote the book to make it feel real… I use my own name, and I dedicated the book to characters in the book to give it the form of a war memoir.
548
I wrote what I felt I had to write, and I’m willing to put my own sanity and my reputation behind it.
549
I’m a big fan of Woody Allen. I used to love the fact that he wrote his own screenplay and acted in the movie.
550
I didn’t choose a word or anything. I just wrote the song until it stopped.
551
I once had a crush on one of my teachers. I wrote him a love letter and stuck it in a bag in his office. I didn’t write my name on it, but I’m sure he figured out it was me.
552
There was always the consolation that if I didn’t like what I wrote I could throw it away or burn it.
553
Seem to be telling this, but really telling that. Three-dimensional writing, like three-dimensional chess. Nabokov was the other master of that. You could learn something from Nabokov on every page he ever wrote.
554
I started listening to music when I wrote when I had three sons at home.
555
Ed Sheeran wrote his songs, so I wanted to write my own songs.
556
I can look back at stuff I wrote in my early days and squirm at some of the mistakes I made. But we’re all learning every day; we never stop. I just hope people keep on liking what I do. That gives me such a kick.
557
I wrote a letter to the CIA on my manual college typewriter. I mailed it to CIA with my resume. I didn’t have an address. So I just put, ‘CIA. Washington, D.C.’
558
I’m not expecting the American literary community to welcome me with open arms. To them I’m just some schmuck kid who wrote some book.
559
I wrote ‘Time of the Dark’ in 1978 and ‘The Silent Tower’ in 1984, so the thing that sticks out for me is how totally technology has changed. I suppose that’s the great peril for real-world crossovers.
560
Albert Camus’s ‘La Peste’ – ‘The Plague’ – had an enormous impact on me when I read it in high school French class, and I chose my senior yearbook quote from it. In college, I wrote a philosophy class paper on Camus and Sartre, and again chose my yearbook quote from ‘La Peste.’
561
‘Band Played On’ is a good one. Barbara Orbison, who was Roy’s wife, was involved in publishing in Nashville because she oversaw Roy’s publishing, and she had a company in Nashville. She had a whole bunch of writers assembled, and they got together every day and wrote, and they write for everybody in Nashville.
562
In my own defense, I wrote a one-man show, and that to me was more where I fit.
563
I have been forgetting things for years – at least since I was in my 30s. I know this because I wrote something about it at the time; I have proof. Of course I can’t remember exactly where I wrote about it or when, but I could probably hunt it up if I had to.
564
My second play, The Birthday Party, I wrote in 1958 – or 1957. It was totally destroyed by the critics of the day, who called it an absolute load of rubbish.
565
In 1966, I attended Marquette University and graduated from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1970. I received my doctorate in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo, where I wrote my dissertation on William Faulkner’s early novels.
566
Peter Breggin, an American psychiatrist, had been criticising SSRIs since the early 1990s. He wrote ‘Talking Back to Prozac’ (1995) to repudiate psychiatrist Peter Kramer’s ‘Listening to Prozac’ (1993) – a bestseller which claimed that Prozac made patients ‘better than well.’
567
There’s a wonderful woodland, spiritual song I wrote in Undercliff in Lyme Regis, and I used to walk up there with my dog and always come back with an idea.
568
I wrote The Same Sea not as a political allegory about Israelis and Palestinians. I wrote it about something much more gutsy and immediate. I wrote it as a piece of chamber music.
569
And the irony is that they wrote better without access to my quotes.
570
You know when I really realized like ‘wow’ what a gift this is was when I sang at camp and a girl wrote me a letter and said the song that I sung kept her from committing suicide.
571
The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he’s written it.
572
I knew that collaborating on songwriting would be difficult for a lot of people, because I was known very much, for my independence and the fact that I wrote these quirky songs that were not typical structure, not typical sound – you know, really original stuff.
573
I did know Ted Hughes and I partly wrote the book to explain to myself and others the complexities of a marriage that was for six years wonderfully productive of poetry and then ended in tragedy.
574
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that when you look into the darkness of the abyss the abyss looks into you. Probably no other line or thought more inspires or informs my work.
575
I wrote ‘Wish U Were Here’ for Cody Simpson, and he invited me to perform with him on tour and be in his music video. He was shy at first. I think it’s the surfer boy in him that makes him so mellow.
576
I wrote… Neon Ballroom in that time where I hated music, really everything about it, I hated it.
577
I was well traveled, and I created this illusion of literacy through reading and writing. I wrote a book of short stories.
578
Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.
579
I grew up – my dad, every time I was with my dad, he was always – not always, but he wrote. He’s a writer. So he was always in his office writing. He made a plan and, like, a point of, ‘This is my work. I’m going to do this every day for these amount of hours.’ So I think that’s where I got, like, a work sort of ethic.
580
Morrissey wrote to me and said, I have a song for you and if we release it as a single, you’ll be on the charts for the first time since 1972, I said, what time, where?
581
At art school, a teacher said: ‘The best paintings are when you get lost in a piece of work and start painting in a stream of consciousness.’ I wanted to do music, not art, so started writing lyrics that way. The first song I wrote was called ‘Ice Cream and Wafers.’ The next was ‘Holding Back the Years.’
582
Certainly in the case of ‘Kill Your Friends,’ a book I wrote more than 10 years ago, I routinely meet interviewers who appear to know the book better than I do. But still, you have to talk about it.
583
I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl, but I didn’t want to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress. I didn’t realize then that it’s the same impulse. It’s make-believe. It’s performance.
584
I never waited for my Irish Cream coffee to be the right temperature, with a storm happening outside and my fireplace crackling… I wrote every day, at home, in the office, whether I felt like it or not. I just did it.
585
When I moved out to Los Angeles to get some film and television work, and couldn’t get any… I became a little isolated, a little terrified, and it’s a good place to get writing, because you’re so bored. So I wrote a few screenplays, and people notice those.
586
I had read everything Peter Drucker ever wrote.
587
The first series I wrote, ‘L.A. Candy,’ was always meant to be a three-book series, so when I started out it was all outlined that way and by the time I was done with the third book, I had become so involved and the process and the stories, I was a little bit sad to be done.
588
I wrote a script. I actually enjoyed writing it more than acting. It’s about the Irish rebellion of 1920, which is a fascinating period and place for me.
589
Possibly he knew, as he wrote this, that he was mad – because inside every madman sits a little sane man saying ‘You’re mad, you’re mad.’
590
In 7th grade, I believe, I wrote my first rap song. It was about everything I was seeing, everything that was going on around me.
591
I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson’s poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.
592
Cooper wrote a novel which is absolutely indistinguishable from Austen, completely from a female point of view, completely English, no sense that he was an American.
593
The author O. Henry taught me about the value of the unexpected. He once wrote about the noise of flowers and the smell of birds – the birds were chickens and the flowers dried sunflowers rattling against a wall.
594
Our founders got it right when they wrote in the Declaration of Independence that our rights come from nature and nature’s God, not from government.
595
When I wrote the Anita Hill book I believed everything I wrote was accurate.
596
Now, I’ll tell you something that might interest you. Casino Royale was the first Bond book that Ian Fleming ever wrote. And he couldn’t get anybody to touch it, to publish it – he couldn’t do anything about it at all. Nobody wanted to know.
597
I’m not embarrassed about the novels I wrote when I was younger, but I couldn’t write them today because of my religion.
598
I first met the subject of X-ray diffraction of crystals in the pages of the book W. H. Bragg wrote for school children in 1925, ‘Concerning the Nature of Things.’
599
Acting’s incredibly enjoyable, but sometimes it doesn’t feel quite enough. I’ve also written a script about the life of Eleanor of Aquitaine. This will make me sound like a female Kenneth Branagh, but I can’t think of anything nicer than directing myself from a script I wrote.
600
Most people believe that the Creator of the universe wrote (or dictated) one of their books. Unfortunately, there are many books that pretend to divine authorship, and each makes incompatible claims about how we all must live.
601
Danny and I wrote 10 songs in seven days, which I thought might be close to the record until you probably look at some of the Beatles statistics.
602
‘Sit Here and Cry’ was one of the first songs I wrote with that overdramatic sarcastic dry sense of humor, which is why the energy of the song doesn’t necessarily reflect the subject matter.
603
I can barely remember what I wrote yesterday, let alone 10 years ago.
604
I wrote in the book very specifically what I wanted to write about, period, and left it at.
605
I had a notepad and I wrote down 30 things to make myself better just off the top of my head, and the next day I started to do that.
606
In college, I faced an interesting problem. I wanted to play music all the time and yet I wasn’t ready for anyone to hear it. To remedy this, I took to retreating to stairwells as a safe place to sing and write music. It was there that I wrote most of my songs in college and really grew into an artist.
607
I wrote every day. I don’t think I could have written ‘Just Kids’ had I not spent all of the 80s developing my craft as a writer.
608
I wrote for a weekly magazine and then edited a literary magazine, but I did not really feel comfortable with the profession of journalism itself.
609
I bought a selection of short, romantic fiction novels, studied them, decided that I had found a formula and then wrote a book that I figured was the perfect story. Thank goodness it was rejected.
610
It is the Constitution of the United States that has been undermined, undercut, and is under attack. It is the American people’s liberties that is in jeopardy. That is why I wrote ‘Losing America.’
611
Up till now I wrote the songs on my acoustic guitar alone with the Lord. Then I would take the song and share it with my family and then we all would figure out instrumentation together.
612
When I wrote ‘East,’ I wanted a completely earthy, very sexy, very violent play, so I wrote in verse. I found it not only satisfying but releasing. It gave me an opportunity to play with language. We never played the characters like the yobs that they are, but rather in a slightly heightened way.
613
I wrote ‘Yellow Submarine’ for the Beatles. I wrote the screenplay for ‘The Games,’ about the Olympic Games. I wrote ‘Love Story,’ both the novel and the screenplay. I wrote ‘RPM’ for Stanley Kramer. Plus, I wrote two scholarly books and a 400-page translation from the Latin, and I dated June Wilkinson!
614
I sang and wrote songs when I was 12 years old.
615
I couldn’t get a job to save my life. That’s why I wrote ‘Road to Paloma.’ That got into Sundance and got into that scene, and that’s how I got the role in ‘The Red Road.’
616
When I wrote The Onion Field, I realized that my first two novels were just practice.
617
I don’t write about certain arguments I have with my wife. I’d get my head torn off if wrote about certain things.
618
I wrote music as soon as I knew notation.
619
I remember so vividly the first song I ever wrote. It was called ‘Different People.’
620
As soon as I began, it seemed impossible to write fast enough – I wrote faster than I would write a letter – two thousand to three thousand words in a morning, and I cannot help it.
621
I asked Ring Lardner the other day how he writes his short stories, and he said he wrote a few widely separated words or phrases on a piece of paper and then went back and filled in the spaces.
622
Of course, I’m older now. I’m in a different place in my life than when I wrote the songs for ‘Car Wheels’ or ‘Essence’ or whatever. Different things were going on.
623
If I ever wrote a book on preaching, it would contain three words: Preach the Word. Get rid of all the other stuff that gets you sidetracked; preach the Word.
624
My next project will be a Christian album, another one. I wrote the songs for the ones you’re referring to, but I want to do some of my old gospel favorites. That’s what my next album’s going to be.
625
My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig.
626
The idea that I wrote something that stood for the way I feel about things, and that it lasts, that’s probably my favorite thing that I’ve done.
627
I have been writing since I was about 20, and at first I wrote in secret and never showed anybody. I was very concerned about making a living, so I conducted.
628
I wrote a novel for my degree, and I’m very happy I didn’t submit that to a publisher. I sympathize with my professors who had to read it.
629
My days, my years, my life has seen up and downs, lights and darknesses. If I wrote only and continually of the ‘light’ and never mentioned the other, then as an artist, I would be a liar.
630
I just wrote one song at a time. Kinda like an alcoholic. One day at a time.
631
Once I had all the facts in, I found I didn’t have the immoral courage to pull the caper. So I wrote it as a story. As a teenager, I didn’t have any skills for writing as such, so it came out in 1500 words.
632
I wrote the original Mike Hammer as a comic, Mike Danger.
633
With our first record, we wrote concept songs but not a concept record.
634
They put a picture of me on a magazine’s cover and wrote ‘Mahima had an accident. She’s got scars all over the face. We can actually call her scarface.’ It still hurts me.
635
I have been called ‘The American De Maupassant.’ Well, I never wrote a filthy word in my life, and I don’t like to be compared to a filthy writer.
636
I’ve tried writing. Two days later I’d go visit it and say, Jesus Christ, who wrote this crap?
637
I know people who have written big hit country songs that are really kind of terrible songs, but for the rest of their life, they’re the guy who wrote that. You’ve got to be careful; if you don’t want that to happen, don’t write those songs.
638
My grandmother passed at 104. She sang and wrote songs until she passed.
639
As a children’s author, reviewers are generally very nice to you. I only ever wrote one adult book and received such a kicking for it that I was in trauma for the next six months.
640
Although a madman, Norton wrote letters to Abraham Lincoln and Queen Victoria which they took seriously.
641
I wrote ‘Time Stops at Shamli’ in 1956, shortly after ‘The Room on the Roof’ was published, and I couldn’t find anyone to publish it.
642
For me, the original play becomes an historical document: This is where I was when I wrote it, and I have to move on now to something else.
643
I was fortunate that I was at newspapers for eight years, where I wrote at least five or six stories every week. You get used to interviewing lots of different people about a lot of different things. And they aren’t things you know about until you do the story.
644
The bands that wrote the big, heroic rock songs – I really wanted to make a record like that.
645
For 35 years, I was a writer. I wrote a lot of jokes. Some of them weren’t funny. Some of them weren’t appropriate. Some of them were downright offensive. I understand that.
646
More than fantasy or even science fiction, Ray Bradbury wrote horror, and like so many great horror writers he was himself utterly without fear, of anything. He wasn’t afraid of looking uncool – he wasn’t scared to openly love innocence, or to be optimistic, or to write sentimentally when he felt that way.
