Word Craft Quotes

Literature exists inside the language. It's made of words. It's not made of ideas and it's not made of concepts, of psychological analysis. It's made of words. In the same way in which music is made of notes and a painting is made of lines of colors, the matter of literature are words.

Around eighth grade I decided I wanted to be a composer and that's what I went to college for. Just a few years back, I switched out of composition and into creative writing so I could work with words.

At the end of the day, I want to be known for my ability to create life from words.

If you want to be good at anything, you have to work hard at it. It doesn't just fall from the sky. I work every day at trying to improve my writing, and I really enjoy it. Nothing fascinates me more than putting words together, and seeing how a collection of words can produce quite a profound effect.

All the characters are made out of words. With reading, I understand that the people aren't real but the fact that they are made out of language and are made out of words is extremely powerful to me. It becomes transformative for me. Different people have different ways of trying to make stories using language.

Tori Amos had a major influence on how I craft words in a song.

Poets are seen as the caretakers of language, so working with words no matter what the form is what we do.

I've always just wanted to earn my living by writing. The best thing is to go into my study in the morning and stay there and put words together.

Shakespeare teaches you how to act. You come out of this process as a better actor. It's just the nature of the words he writes.

You can be amazing, you can turn a phrase into a weapon or a drug

I write lyrics. putting words and melodies to my songs. That's a real challenge, I take it on vigorously.

From authors whom I read more than once I learn to value the weight of words and to delight in their meter and cadence -- in Gibbon's polyphonic counterpoint and Guedalla's command of the subjunctive, in Mailer's hyperbole and Dillard's similes, in Twain's invectives and burlesques with which he set the torch of his ferocious wit to the hospitality tents of the world's colossal humbug . . . I know no other way out of what is both the maze of the eternal present and the prison of the self except with a string of words.

I just see myself as someone who has a bit of a way with words, basically.

Writing for radio really focuses the mind, because you can't rely on thinking "Oh, just pull a funny face at the end of this sketch." You've got to try to work on the words.

My essential identity is that of a writer.