Umberto Eco Quotes

Sometimes things just fall out of your head on the paper, and if you're smart, you learn not to touch them.

The mind travels faster than the pen; consequently, writing becomes a question of learning to make occasional wing shots, bringing down the bird of thought as it flashes by. A writer is a gunner, sometimes waiting in the blind for something to come in, sometimes roaming the countryside hoping to scare something up.

Writing is not hard. Just get paper and pencil, sit down, and write as it occurs to you. The writing is easy-it's the occurring that's hard.

All there is to writing is having ideas. To learn to write is to learn to have ideas.

Everything starts with writing.

Usually when I'm writing, I kind of know what it is before I start writing and I write stream of consciousness style.

If a person has never given writing a try, they assume that a brilliant idea is hard to come by. But really, even if it takes some digging, ideas are out there. Just open your eyes and look at the world. Writing the ideas down, it turns out, is the real trick.

Sometimes reading other writers helps. You learn some little technique that turns out to be useful, or simply are reinspired by the amazing things others do.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

All I know is that I have way more stuff that I want to write about than I possibly have time to.

But, yeah, I'm really happy when I'm writing. When I'm being creative and when I have something that I can put down. You know, if you go out and you overhear a conversation or you have a thought, you have a receptacle to go home and say, 'Oh, this would be great in this script.' Your antenna's out in a different way, and I love that time.

It was kind of enlightening to become a playwright.

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

When you're writing, you're putting thought into what you want to express, and then you come up with it - it comes to you. When you're improvising, it's the same thing. You're writing. You just say it out loud right then, instead of saying, 'You think this might work?'

As authors, we know that it is very difficult to unleash one's creativity.

I gotta pound the keys for the ideas to flow.

Hitch your unconscious mind to your writing arm.

Write what you love and love what you write.

Once an interesting idea or theme occurs to me then I would want to write a poem about it. The rest, frankly, is not difficult.

Nothing arrives on paper as it started, and so much arrives that never started at all. To write is always to rave a little-even if one did once know what one meant

Just start writing and you'll find what you want to say.

I've now learned how to do it, I can write anywhere. I'm the type of person that will get a random idea and then I'll have to write it down and then continue on it. It can be anywhere. It doesn't have to be a set place.

Since I was a kid, I could make up stories, I could make up funny jokes and I could always do it. When I'm walking down the street or having dinner, ideas will hit me, and I write them down on matchbooks or napkins and throw them in the draw.

I learned to just show up at the page and write down what I heard. Writing became more like eavesdropping and less like inventing a nuclear bomb.