Quotes About Writing

Whatever part of writing that is subconscious is a thing that no one has access to.

I started writing for myself when I didn't know how to understand how I was feeling, and I didn't know how to talk to people about it, so I would break into the subconscious to try and understand what I was going through.

When you trust your subconscious enough to put something in a story and then figure out why it really needed to be there later, when that works out, aye, that's the stuff.

Your subconscious mind is trying to help you all the time. That's why I keep a journal - not for chatter but for mostly the images that flow into the mind or little ideas. I keep a running journal, and I have all of my life, so it's like your gold mine when you start writing.

I did not end up as broadly educated as my Cambridge colleagues, but I graduated probably better equipped to write a book on my chosen subject.

When I was in college or working, I had the luxury of writing on whatever subject. Now, I'm in the business, I have a deadline and pressures. Sometimes, I have to do things that I am not in the mood for.

As for critical writing about modernism, its moments of lucidity are but fulgurations illuminating the dark and incomprehensible landscape of its subject's unabashed difficulty.

As a rule, I am very skeptical of tying books to anniversaries. I don't think readers care. I also feel that it just about guarantees that somebody else will be writing a book on the same subject, but being a former journalist, I'm always interested in, like, why write about something today? Why do it now?

Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.

I read round the subject, I make a skeleton outline, and then I start work in the relevant archives. During the marshaling of the material, I copy the material from each archive file across to the relevant chapter in the skeleton outline.

Writing can sometimes be exploitative. I like to take a few steps of remove in order to respect the privacy of the subject. If readers make the link, they have engaged with the poem.

My best chance is that, in a happy moment, I hit upon St Francis as the subject for a series of plays. Others might have written them better: but, as I have written them, the advantage will probably remain mine.

Well, the attractive thing about the subject of happiness is that it is notoriously difficult to write.

I'm a writer, and the subject is less important than the act of writing itself.

As a journalist, I'm not supposed to be the subject, but as an author, I'm fair game - another ingredient in the media soup.

In an ideal world, the perfect biographical subject would have been the star of his penmanship class at grade school - and would thereafter write an English that positively sings.

Trying to write books with a subject matter or in a genre or style you're not familiar with is the best way to find the Big Block looming.

Whatever I write, no matter how gray or dark the subject matter, it's still going to be a comic novel.

Even when the writing seems very frivolous, I'm puritanical. I don't mean my subject matter. It's that I'm almost pathologically incapable of leaving something when I'm not quite happy with it.

Subject matter is sort of overemphasized in the way books get discussed, I think.

It's very hard to deal with true subject matter, especially when you're writing about such weighty issues.

I found when I started getting serious about writing music, that my writing was country songs. It was basically country subject matter, country melodies and simple chord changes.

I think growing up the way I did has made me a lot more objective, and that's important in the process of writing and trying to look at subjective matter that way.

Whenever you write script without a director, you put in things that point toward a style in which the story will be told, a subjective style.