Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

When I'm writing something, if there's a part that's good for me, then I'll play it. Otherwise, I don't. And I notice that there are less and less parts for me in my own writing.

I'm excited to bring my characters to life in book form.

Anyone who undertakes the literary grind had better like playing around with words.

I've thought about writing, but it hasn't happened yet. It's like schoolwork - you start doing your revisions two nights before you're compelled to turn it in.

For many years, I thought a poem was a whisper overheard, not an aria heard.

I want to write a book of poetry, as well as children's stories.

A writer's problem does not change. He himself changes and the world he lives in changes but his problem remains the same. It is always how to write truly and having found what is true, to project it is such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.

I had a series of terrible jobs, whatever would allow me to write for four hours during the day. During that time I wrote three novels - all of which were extraordinarily poor. I decided after that to go and get my MFA.

Be willing and unafraid to write badly, because often the bad stuff...forms a base on which to build something better.

If you always dreamed of writing a novel or a memoir, and you used to love to write, and were pretty good at it, will it break your heart if it turns out you never got around to it? If you wake up one day at eighty, will you feel nonchalant that something always took precedence over a daily commitment to discovering your creative spirit? If not--if this very thought fills you with regret--then what are you waiting for?

Skill in writing frees you to write what you want to write. It may also show you what you want to write. Craft enables art.

I used to write poems more when I was younger, but I haven't in a long time. I just write ideas and paragraphs and go from there.

I didn't know if it would be a successful one, or what the stages would be, but I always saw myself as a lifetime musician and songwriter...I was always concerned with writing to my age at a particular moment. That was the way I would keep faith with the audience that supported me as I went along...I'm a synthesist. I'm always making music. And I make a lot of different kinds of music all the time. Some of it gets finished and some of it doesn't...The best music is essentially there to provide you something to face the world with.

You like to write. It's the single most important quality for someone who wants to be a writer. But not in itself enough.

While I do believe I become a technically better writer over time, in others ways writing gets harder because inspiration is finite.

You can't write well what you don't read for pleasure. If it doesn't entertain you, it's not going to entertain anyone else.

The truth is I tried to write for years and I wasn't very good.

As a poet or a novelist or a painter, you are pushing yourself all the time, always looking for a new way to approach something, challenging yourself and never, never trying to write the same book twice.

I've been writing songs since I was like six or seven. I've been writing poetry and short stories and stuff, but my first serious, serious song, I wrote when I was fourteen.

I could not live by literature if only to begin with, because of the slow maturing of my work and its special character.

I've lost my writing skills since college. I couldn't write a book. It would take a long time.

I always think about myself as a writer; that comes out of being a reader first, and I don't think I kind of got to really playing with language in any formal way probably until I was in my mid-twenties.

Writing books isn't a drastic departure from writing for the stage.

To sum it all up, if you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must write dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next.

There is no pleasure in the world like writing well and going fast.