Jim Woodring Quotes

It's not that I sit down and write great stuff without thinking, not at all. Most of it is terrible. But the stuff that feels fun and fresh to me tends to happen fairly unthinkingly.

I don't want to sound pretentious or meta or anything, but I don't write until it comes to me... People know when something is inspired and when something is not, and I don't want to waste anyone's time.

Anything that I write comes from the soul.

Occasionally if I look back at something I've written I'll find one of those that I don't understand, but that's a bad thing - the unconscious has dealt me a bad hand.

I write a chapter, then edit it and edit it and edit it and edit it. I don't think we mine creativity from within. It's bestowed from on high, from God.

When I try to write I try to write something different every time. That's the challenge.

Every time I write a song I feel really lucky and kind of surprised. Not surprised that I wrote it, but just surprised that things exist that you don't know about.

A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.

I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.

There are no rules and regulations for perfect composition. If there were we would be able to put all the information into a computer and would come out with a masterpiece. We know that's impossible. You have to compose by the seat of your pants.

A lot of things you just stumble into: relationships or ways of putting characters opposite one another that really worked. So then it's not always so much about imitating other people, but imitating yourself, at least in your thinking.

Every time I write a new book, I want to push myself to try something different.

I've always thought that the balance between the side of my mind that knows what it is doing and the side that really hasn't got a clue has to be carefully maintained because if you write too knowingly then you get chilly, and if you write too unknowingly you write bollocks that nobody else can understand.

I wanted to create a body of work that I was proud of. It's come from honesty and integrity, without forcing anything from myself, the ideas had to come instinctively and organically. Whether that translates to people in that way, it's kind of out of my hands now.

In order to get new things to rap about, you've gotta live.

Readers would email me and say, 'Please write a novel about so-and-so,' but it has to come from yourself and not so much from your readership.

I've never had a writer's block, but still I think: 'Is it going to happen this time?' You never know what you're going to get; you just put your fingers on the keys and hope.

No thesaurus can give you those words, no rhyming dictionary. They must happen out of you.

I prefer writing originals.

I think a badly crafted, great idea for a new film with a ton of spelling mistakes is just 100 times better than a well-crafted stale script.

Having imagination it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that if you were unimaginative would take you only a minute.

I don't want to write formula. I don't want to crank these books out like sausages. Every book is different, which takes a hell of a lot of ingenuity on my part.

I try not to observe myself in the process of composing a poem because I don't want to come up with a formula, which I would then be unscrupulous in using.

Back when I taught middle school and wrote adult mysteries, my students often asked me why I wasn't writing for kids. I never had a good answer for them. It took me a long time to realize they were right.

For me, it would be pointless to write a novel that I knew I could complete within a specific length of time. I could do that only by repeating something I had done before, and I've never wanted to do that.