Perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood.
When you try to unravel something you've written, you belittle it in a way. It was created as a mystery.
Michael Lowenthal has written a big-hearted and wise book about familial love in all its richness and complexity.
I always wince a little bit when I send me to each of my new books. I wince at submitting myself to my father's judgment. But, of course, he's such a fond father that he always writes back, saying it's the greatest thing ever written.
I've written songs about things that nobody else has ever written about.
The act of writing bears something in common with the act of love. The writer, at his most productive moments, just flows. He gives of that which is uniquely himself. He makes himself naked, recording his nakedness in the written word. Herein lies some of the terror which frequently freezes a writer, preventing him from producing. Herein, too, lies some of the courage that must be entailed in letting others learn how one has experienced or is experiencing the world.
Drawing is the poet's written line, set down to see if there be a story worth telling, a truth worth revealing.
More often than not, whenever gossip has been written about me, the gossip is more interesting than the reality. I know some public figures hate gossip, but personally I like it because it makes my life sound more glamorous and interesting than it really is.
[Emacs] is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful.
I understand that you take the Bible, as written in English, translated many many times over the last three millennia as to be a more accurate, more reasonable assessment of the natural laws we see around us than what I and everybody in here can observe. That, to me, is unsettling.
I do think that just about whenever I am writing, or more accurately, whenever I have written, I feel better and more at peace as a human being. That doesn't mean, unfortunately, that the literary product is any good.
For the record, I am not an admitted homosexual, nor am I a homosexual, though I do know the lyrics to every show tune ever written, which might perhaps account for the confusion.
The first duty of the novelist is to entertain. It is a moral duty. People who read your books are sick, sad, traveling, in the hospital waiting room while someone is dying. Books are written by the alone for the alone.
Let it (what you have written) be kept back until the ninth year. [Lat. , Nonumque prematur in annum. ]
Armed with all the powers, enjoying all the wealth they owe to science, our societies are still trying to practice and to teach systems of values already destroyed at the roots by that very science. Man knows at last that he is alone in the indifferent immensity of the universe, whence which he has emerged by chance. His duty, like his fate, is written nowhere.
The greater part of critics are parasites, who, if nothing had been written, would find nothing to write.
So much of a novelist's writing, as I have said, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on the paper. We remember details of our story, we do not invent them.
I once saw a picture in the paper of John Hegley with 'poet' written on his knuckles, and I thought that was pretty cool, so I was quite up front about it.
Sometimes you can't help but pay attention to what is written about you. You are trying not to because it's generally not constructive, it can be very funny, in which case it's fine to pay attention to it if you're going to laugh about it. But if it's going to get you angry then it's a pretty pointless waste of energy, so I try and be selective about what I take an interest in about myself.
Ever since I picked up a bass, I've written songs.