#writ

I wanted to play rock and roll when I started playing. Nobody at that time ever thought about songwriting. You sang songs, that's all. You sang other people's songs. That's all there were. ↗

— Bruce Cockburn

#ever #i #nobody #other #people

There's the famous thing that the A&R man from the record company is supposed to do: He's supposed to come into the studio and listen to the songs you've been recording and then say, 'Guys, I don't hear any singles.' And then everybody falls into a terrible depression because you have to write one. ↗

— Jarvis Cocker

#any #because #been #come #company

I just wrote what I felt like writing since they seemed to sell. ↗

— Jack Vance

#i #just #like #seemed #sell

Commissions suit me. They set limits. Jean Marais dared me to write play in which he would not speak in the first act, would weep for joy in the second and in the last would fall backward down a flight of stairs. ↗

— Jean Cocteau

#backward #commissions #dared #down #fall

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. ↗

— Jack Vance

#had #his #imagination #smith #talented

It's a marvellous life, a gregarious life that we've had. We're very lucky in that way. Unlike writers or painters, we don't sit down in front of a blank canvas and say, 'How do I start? Where do I start?' ↗

— Albert Finney

#blank canvas #canvas #down #front #gregarious

But at the same time, I have trouble keeping things out of books, which is why I don't write short stories because they turn into novels. ↗

— Jonathan Coe

#books #i #into #keeping #novels

But I have always - ever since The Accidental Woman - written novels about individuals attempting to make choices in the context of situations over which they have no control. ↗

— Jonathan Coe

#accidental #always #attempting #choices #context

I became quite taken over by Johnson's personality at some points while writing the biography, and since I went straight on to The Closed Circle afterwards, I did sometimes feel I could hear him whispering in my ear while I was working on it. ↗

— Jonathan Coe

#became #biography #circle #closed #could

I have two ideas for novels at the moment, neither of them all that conventional, but I'm not ready to choose between them yet, let alone settle down to the process of writing. ↗

— Jonathan Coe

#between #choose #conventional #down #i