Lou Reed Quotes

I remember liking to write stories pretty early on. In fourth or fifth grade, they would give us the beginning of a story, and we were supposed to finish it. I remember liking that. But I didn't think about deciding to become a writer until high school at about the age of 16.

I just loved storytelling. That's what I thought I would end up doing. I thought I would probably go to school and end up writing for a magazine or something.

I majored in English in college and that was my major in graduate school before switching to creative writing. I read a lot of [Charles] Dickens and [Anthony ] Trollope, but there was lots of stuff I hadn't read like Thackeray's "Vanity Fair," which is so well written and funny.

For music, I always just played music myself - and, I had rock bands and wrote songs and put bands together that were loud, but not especially good. That was sort of the place music had in my career.

While I was in school, trying to figure out how to write an essay that could both satisfy my nonfiction workshops and still pass as something hybrid-y enough for my poetry workshops, I was looking for models, for forebears.

But, that was the beginning, though I didn't start writing until I was in high school and when I was in high school I really began to write poetry with great energy and enthusiasm.

I've always liked to write, but I never thought I could make a career out of it. I went to business school because in the '80, it was the thing to do. I thought that marketing was a way to be creative in business, but quickly learned all creative stuff happens at the ad agency.

Quite often when I record a song, writing it and making a demo is the big thing and, after that, I think, how do I actually translate this into real life? A lot of the time I think I can't be bothered.

I love writing songs where the name is the title.

I wanted to perform, I wanted to write songs, and I wanted to get lots of chicks.

Writing, madam, is a mechanic part of wit. A gentleman should never go beyond a song or a billet.

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time. A lot of the people whose work they’ve taught in the schools for the last thirty years, I can’t understand why people read them and why they are taught.

A pop song is a condensed version of a life in three minutes, whereas, when you go to write your prose, you have to find the rhythm in your words, and you have to find the rhythm in the voice that you have found and the way you're speaking.

Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers. If they arrive at college with literary ambitions, they should be told that everything they have done since their first childhood poems, printed in the school paper, has been preparation for entering a long, long apprenticeship.

I was probably 16.I played - I tried to play these songs that I had written. And, this was a common theme when I was younger: I would write a song about somebody, and they would come to my show. I wouldn't be able to play the whole thing, because, there would be some giant, loaded secret coming up in like, the third verse, or something.

Still, I kept writing. I had no guarantee that I would someday win awards for writing. Heavens, the only person during that time who seemed to think I could write something worth publishing was my loyal husband. But I always remembered the professor from graduate school who urged me to write and who recommended me for that first writing assignment in 1964. When I protested to Sara Little that I didn't want to add another mediocre writer to the world, she gently reminded me that if I didn't dare mediocrity, I would never write anything at all.

I would be jokesmithing. I had files with tons of disses that I would try to write as I was on the train going to school.

I write songs about what I go through.

Whether it's a letter, song lyrics, part of a novel, or instructions on how to fix a kitchen sink, it's writing. You keep your craft honed, you acquire the discipline to finish things. You turn into a self-taskmaster.

To create an album of 12 songs, I've got to write about 80 songs. Half of those are totally weird and rubbish.

I find it hard to express myself when writing from the f - - - heart or the a - , or wherever. It's just like anything, it's (easier) when you get used to it, but I've not done it. I was just a singer in a band.

In school, writing was the only thing that really came naturally to me, but it wasn't until college that I realized that I could do it for more than just fun.

I used to do a lot of story writing and storytelling coming up through grade school. By the time I got to college, I decided that I wanted to perform as well, and that's where I started.

It was a great thrill just to know Roy Orbison, so to play, sing, write hit songs with him and have him in The Traveling Wilburys was beyond my wildest dreams!

I got a new 4-track cassette recorder a year or so after high school. For a while I would just stare at it thinking, how am I going to do this if I don't play guitar or keyboards? How am I going to write and record a song if I don't know how to play any instruments? I mean, I played the violin, but I didn't know anything about how to work a 4-track.