The best writing is not about the writer the best writing is absolutely not about the writer it's about us it's about the reader.
At some point I would like to write a book and other things but I work best when there is some sort of deadline in my own mind but not when fifty people or fifty million people are breathing down the back of my neck.
Being fired was the best luck of my life. It made me stop and reflect. It was the birth of my life as a writer.
Townes van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world and I'll stand on Bob Dylan's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.
I know I'm not the best. I'm not the best singer I'm not the best songwriter I'm not the best player.
To write the lives of the great in separating them from their works necessarily ends by above all stressing their pettiness because it is in their work that they have put the best of themselves.
The waste basket is the writer's best friend.
You hear the best stories from ordinary people. That sense of immediacy is more real to me than a lot of writerly literary-type crafted stories. I want that immediacy when I read a novel.
If anything I try to write something that would be more difficult to film. I tend to see film as competition and would like instead to do what books do best.
Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.
Civilization had too many rules for me so I did my best to rewrite them.
Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.
The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer.
Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.
Literature boils with the madcap careers of writers brought to the edge by the demands of living on their nerves wringing out their memories and their nightmares to extract meaning truth beauty.
Of course all of the software I write runs on Linux that's the beauty of standards and of cross-platform code. I don't have to run your OS and you don't have to run mine and we can use the same applications anyway!
The world is a crazy beautiful ugly complicated place and it keeps moving on from crisis to strangeness to beauty to weirdness to tragedy. The caravan keeps moving on and the job of the longform writer or filmmaker or radio broadcaster is to stop - is to pause - and when the caravan goes away that's when this stuff comes.
I mean the beauty of being a writer is it's not like being a swimmer. When they were talking about our Olympic swimmers and they'd say 'Oh she's so old ' and she's all of 25 or something. So the beauty for a writer is that you can keep doing it right into your dotage and I hope to be able to keep doing it as long as I can get away with it yeah.
Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract to express it in the most general terms to find some universal formula for it.
As an inspiration to the author I do not think the cat can be over-estimated. He suggests so much grace power beauty motion mysticism. I do not wonder that many writers love cats I am only surprised that all do not.
I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate.
Hardboiled crime fiction came of age in 'Black Mask' magazine during the Twenties and Thirties. Writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler learnt their craft and developed a distinct literary style and attitude toward the modern world.
Sid Vicious began the age of participation in which everyone could be the artist. Sid proved that you don't have to play well to be the star. You can play badly or not even at all. I endorsed that attitude. If you can't write songs no problem - simply steal one and change it to your taste.