Writing Quotes

Each song is a child I nourish and give my love to. But even if you have never written a song, your life is a song. How can it not be?

The key to being a wonderful writer is not to write. You just get out of the way, leave room for God to walk in the room, and when I write something that I know is right, I get on my knees and say, 'Thank You.

Songs are my diaries; they always have been. You have to put your trust in everyone because putting down those real, personal details and thoughts that make a song authentic also opens you right up. I am constantly misunderstood; a lot of people just don't get me.

My experience with songwriting is usually so confessional, it's so drawn from my own life and my own stories.

Write without pay until somebody offers to pay you. If nobody offers within three years, sawing wood is what you were intended for.

Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

Don't say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.

I have found that a story leaves a deeper impression when it is impossible to tell which side the author is on.

It is easier to produce ten volumes of philosophical writings than to put one principle into practice.

Drama, instead of telling us the whole of a man's life, must place him in such a situation, tie such a knot, that when it is untied, the whole man is visible.

Writing laws is easy, but governing is difficult.

Not one word, not one gesture of yours shall I, could I, ever forget.

I can't understand how anyone can write without rewriting everything over and over again.

The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.

The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and to write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money.

Effectiveness of assertion is the alpha and omega of style.

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

Your first discipline is your vocabulary; then your grammar and your punctuation Then, in your exuberance and bounding energy you say you're going to add to that. Then you add rhyme and meter. And your delight is in that power.

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.

I write to find out what I didn't know I knew.