Mary MacLane Quotes

As soon as you start to think of that thing that you want to convey or say, you can always just say it much better than you can actually rhyme it or stuff it into a song. It's very, very difficult to just kind of get your point across without going the back way. And you have to be good at that, to not think about things so hard. Let the pen take over, so that it's somebody else's job to dissect the lyrics and tell you what you're all about.

We are all writers and readers as well as communicators with the need at times to please and satisfy ourselves with the clear and almost perfect thought.

One can usually put one's thoughts better in one's own words.

One thing that makes me very happy is to have a complicated idea and to feel that I've expressed myself clearly. I remember writing the ending to 'Happier at Home.' I wrote the entire book to build to that ending 'now is now,' and what I had to say was very abstract, and yet I felt satisfied that I managed to say what I wanted to say.

Every writer hopes his or her book will be its own thing.

I didn't have any concept of Trainspotting being published. It was a selfish act. I did it for myself.

I think that when I am making music, if I can be really happy with it and get my message across, then that is the most important thing.

I have a lot to say about the world, clearly. I can't put together a clear sentence about it all, but through the work I can say what I think.

I think what I love most [about writing] is that feeling that you really nailed something. Sometimes with a line you feel that it really captured what it is that you had inside you and you got it out for a stranger to read, someone who may never love you or meet you, but he or she is going to get that experience from that line.

There's all the difference in the world between having something to say, and having to say something.

Once I started reinventing for myself what being an artist was - not going into a studio, but making things on my own terms in response to being out in the world - I started to really enjoy it... I realized that everything else for me was hell.

The craft of writing is the art of penetrating other minds with the figures that are in your own mind.

The way for a person to develop a style is (a) to know exactly what he wants to say, and (b) to be sure he is saying exactly that.

It is a fault to wish to be understood before we have made ourselves clear to ourselves.

My first book really did change my life. It allowed me to fully express myself. There was a sense that I was worth something as an artist.

Mary wished to say something very sensible, but knew not how.

The art of writing is not, as many seem to imagine, the art of bringing fine phrases into rhythmical order, but the art of placing before the reader intelligible symbols of the thoughts and feelings in the writer's mind.

The art of writing is the art of doing what you think you're doing. This is not as simple as it sounds. It implies a very difficult undertaking: the necessity to think. And it implies the requirement to think out three separate, very hard problems: What is it you want to say? How are you going to say it? Have you really said it?

All good poems are victories over something.

I write because it gives me the greatest possible artistic pleasure to write. If my work pleases the few I am gratified. As for the mob, I have no desire to be a popular novelist. It is far too easy.

I enjoy writing. I enjoy communicating and connecting.

Do but take care to express yourself in a plain, easy Manner, in well-chosen, significant and decent Terms, and to give a harmonious and pleasing Turn to your Periods: study to explain your Thoughts, and set them in the truest Light, labouring as much as possible, not to leave them dark nor intricate, but clear and intelligible.

If the reader doesn't understand what you're saying, you're talking to yourself.

There's a power in words. There's a power in being able to explain and describe and articulate what you know and feel and believe about the world, and about yourself.

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear. If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable. But when you want to say something life-changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent of your own talent.