Rodney Crowell Quotes

I am a very linear thinker, so I write beginning to end. I write hundreds of pages per book that never make it into print.

I think that there are fiction writers for whom that works well. I could never do it. I feel as if, by the time I see that it's a poem, it's almost written in my head somewhere.

The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.

Read and write with a sensitive ear. The craft of writing is very important. Practice the craft.

I'll agonize over sentences. Mostly because you're trying to create specific effects with sentences, and because there are a number of different voices in the book.

Writing is a difficult thing.

It isn't as if a writer merely records life as it unfurls. Reality does not automatically transcribe as literature; real people are not shapely, compelling characters to be harvested. Charming facts and sharp observations rarely slide seamlessly into whatever narrative is at hand.

Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially.

For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a scrap of narrative, an isolated description of a common object, an elaborate running metaphor which threads between the sequences and holds different narrative lines together.

Ultimately, it's about the quality of the writing whatever style you are writing.

Nonfiction writers are the packhorses of literature. We're meant to carry the story. If we can make it up and down the mountain by a reliable if not scenic route, we have delivered. Technique is optional.

There are writers whose first drafts are so lean, so skimpy, that they must go back and add words, sentences, paragraphs to make their fiction intelligible or interesting. I don't know any of these writers.

I consider what I write to be literature. I choose the words carefully.

Writing is not like acting, where you can pull these little stunts that create a particular effect. Words are all it is about, and the way you use words has to be individual and particular to you.

Writing is a struggle no matter what the genre.

At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read and the way I write. Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.

I want to be a better writer. I want to learn and grow, to know how to tell stories in a different and more challenging way. I've learned it doesn't get easier each time. It actually gets harder.

A writer is a tool of the language rather than the other way around.

Lyrics are really, really hard, I think, or at least they're really hard for me. Some people can channel lyrics faster. I find them very hard to find, so because of it, they take me a long time, and I really think about them.

I intentionally approached each story in 'Killing and Dying' in a different way, and that includes the writing process.

It used to be that phrases and lines would come into my head, often many of them in a period of five days or a week, and maybe I didn't know what I was talking about, but the words had a kind of heaviness or deliciousness to them.

When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical - one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float.

I made a deliberate choice to write something people would enjoy, not knock people out with 'Boy, he can really put a clause together!'

I would recommend the short story form, which is a lot harder to write since you have to be so careful with words, until there is plenty of time to doodle through a novel.

I think I've written 40 books, and none of them have been heavy on action. I'm an introspective person.