Hal David Quotes

When it comes to lyrics, I just write down a lot of things, and only a very tiny fraction of it, I think, is any good.

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.

The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.

After finishing a draft, no matter how rough, I almost always put it aside for a while. It doesn't matter if it's a story or a novel, I find that when it's still fresh in my mind I'm either thoroughly sick of its flaws or completely blind to them. Either way, I'm unable to make substantive edits of any value.

Be prepared to fall out of love with your words. I'm still too verbose at times.

I can always write. Sometimes, to be sure, what I write is crap, but it's words on the page and therefore it is something to work with.

I am never really surprised at the way my books take shape. They are just not as perfect as I'd like them to be.

Creating fantasy is a very personal thing, but you can't take the process too personally.

I write really slowly, and my lines are really, really terrible all the time. It takes so long for me to get them to be where I won't be embarrassed to sing them, and then feel like they're great.

Sometimes I'll be writing something, and I say to myself, 'Okay, that's definitely DTB,' or, 'It's definitely Strapping.'

Write something and leave it aside so you've practically forgotten it as much as possible, a month or so, then come back and read it as if you're reading it for the first time.

I have a high guilt quotient. A poem can go through as many as 50 or 60 drafts. It can take from a day to two years-or longer.

I love rewriting because that is where and how you discover the story. It's like you have this skeleton, and you get to put flesh on it and hair and clothes and really wonderful jewelry.

The process of rewriting is enjoyable, because you're not in that existential panic when you don't have a novel at all.

You become a great writer by writing.

Write every day, just to keep in the habit, and remember that whatever you have written is neither as good nor as bad as you think it is. Just keep going, and tell yourself that you will fix it later.

I wrote a piece for the school literary magazine that now makes me think: 'My God in Heaven, this is just the worst drivel.'

I sit down and draw from my lyric book. I sit down and start looking through it and see if there is anything that strikes me that I've written.

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years at least.

Books aren't written - they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it.

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.

I haven't had trouble with writer's block. I think it's because my process involves writing very badly. My first drafts are filled with lurching, cliched writing, outright flailing around. Writing that doesn't have a good voice or any voice. But then there will be good moments.

It always strikes me how almost unbelievably bad are the early versions of my novels.

Writing itself does not know what it looks like while one is doing it, only when it's finished.

When I'm writing a song for another artist, I purposefully make it not for me; otherwise, I get too attached.