#writing

Life's too short to be sat at home writing all the time. ↗

— Helen Hodgman

#life #life-s-too-short #writing #life

This, above all, ask yourself in the stillest hour of the night: must I write? Delve deep into yourself. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this question witha strong and simple 'I must' then build your lfie according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it. ↗

— Rainer Maria Rilke

#life

Writing is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similes and pretty thoughts and images… It is not a conscious recording of the day’s experiences ‘freshly and with the appearance of reality’… The writer of imagination would find himself released from observing things for the purpose of writing them down later. He would be there to enjoy, to taste, to engage the free world, not a world which he carries like a bag of food, always fearful lest he drop something or someone get more than he. ↗

— William Carlos Williams

#experience

'Hound Dog' took like twelve minutes. That's not a complicated piece of work. But the rhyme scheme was difficult. Also the metric structure of the music was not easy. 'Kansas City' was maybe eight minutes, if that. Writing the early blues was spontaneous. You can hear the energy in the work. ↗

— Jerry Leiber

#blues #city #complicated #difficult #dog

When I need the idea, I can find it immediately. I have a horror of rewriting or deleting; the parts of my composition are carried in my head 'till I can write them down, even to the last note. Then I do not alter a jot. ↗

— Ruggero Leoncavallo

#carried #composition #down #even #find

I'm not a born writer, and I don't enjoy writing. ↗

— Alistair Maclean

#enjoy #i #writer #writing

Pale as a candle flame in the dusk, tallow-pale, he stalked along, holding her hand, and Louie looked up and beyond him at the enfeebled stars. Thus, for many years, she had seen her father's head, a ghostly earth flame against the heavens, from her little height. Sam looked down on the moon of her face; the dayshine was enough still to light the eyeballs swimming up to him. ↗

— Christina Stead

#beauty

The real danger of writing a great song when you're on something is that it might get you thinking that the only way to repeat that is by only writing when you're high. ↗

— Barry Mann

#get #great #high #might #only

When I'm writing a novel, I'm dealing with a double life. I live in the present at the same time that I live in the past with my characters. It is this that makes a novelist so eccentric and unpleasant. ↗

— John Phillips Marquand

#dealing #double #eccentric #i #in the past

What I mean is that none of my talents had a - what's that great word - rubric. A singer, an actor, a dancer - there was nothing I could really say I was. The writing came much later. And, actually, thank God, because if I had said I'm a singer, I would really have just had one thing to do. ↗

— Steve Martin

#actually #because #came #could #dancer