Florida Scott-Maxwell Quotes

I feel uninhibited when I'm writing.

And write what you love - don't feel pressured to write serious prose if what you like is to be funny.

Because there is so little room for expression otherwise, a lot of people love cinema because they find it a way of expressing themselves.

Sometimes, particularly in summers in New York, I have tried to write in shorts or with no shirt on and found myself unable to do so, the reason being, I take it, that writing, even of the most impersonal sort, is for me a divestment, a striptease, even, so that if I start off undressed, I have nowhere to go.

Drawing Is An Escape From All The Unecessary Things In Life That Get In The Way Of Being Free

I wasn't quite used to writing a diary - I didn't understand why people did it - but I wrote down notes and they went into a poem.

I started carrying blank books like this one around, which I would fill with all the things I couldn't say.

I'm not very much an open book, I do really express myself only through my music and when I'm in that safe environment and I don't have to let anything go out of the studios that I don't want to go out.

Pardon me, my friends, I have ventured to paint my happiness on the wall.

I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.

When I write for myself, I just get to be myself.

Being a musician enables a person to bend the notes and express things that are inside you, no matter what.

I just want to start writing, whether or not any of it is useable or marketable.

We all want to have a place where we can dream and escape anything that wraps steel bands around our imagination and creativity.

Over a year before I started recording Salad Days, so I finally sat down and was like I have to do this. And it did feel like a chore. I was looking at it in a completely wrong way, trying to one up myself. Just the typical sophomore album bullshit. The main thing I got out of it is I eventually gave up on all that stuff. I had to re-learn why I liked making music in the first place, why I liked recording in my room all the time. Because it's fun. It's fun for me.

I've always written songs for the sake of my own sanity and expression.

You're writing it is how you feel. And when you're finished you put your signature on it and you mail it off and that's it. And that's how "Stand By Me" was really.

I just write from how I feel. As an outlet.

What you write should entertain you and serve you first. Don't worry about maintaining anything beyond your own attention. Focus on exorcising your demons in the work. If you can do that, then you'll succeed in the world.

Writing becomes a really good creative outlet when you're sitting there and feeling creatively frustrated or stilted, but also you then get to write parts for yourself.

I feel that I'm an essayist and that my best work gets done in that form. I wanted to do a book where the essays could exist on their own terms. A book that was neither a book of essays that were shoehorned into a memoir, nor [one where] the essays had been published elsewhere first, [because] then they would kind of bear the marks of those publications.

You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.

I've always expressed myself best through writing. I've gotten out all of my deepest feelings that way for as long as I can remember.

I don't think of myself as making art. I do what I do because I want to, because painting is the best way I've found to get along with myself.

The less attention I pay to what people want and the more attention I pay to just writing the book I want to write, the better I do.