I'm not afraid, as a writer, of being emotional. I'm obsessed with human emotion, body parts, physicality.
A sports writer is a stylist of some kind. He is trying to convey mood and character and emotion.
The books that I wrote in my late teens and 20s, the little love stories, they were right from the heart.
I always have strong feelings when I'm writing a book. Sometimes when I'm writing a book, I even cry when I'm writing. Once I read a quotation that I thought was very true for me, which is: "No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader."
A pen went scribbling along. When it tried to write love, it broke.
The language of love letters is the same as suicide notes.
whenever I read a passage that moves me, I transcribe it in my diary, hoping my fingers might learn what excellence feels like.
Dip your pen into your arteries and write.
Norbert Blei is a writer the way people used to be troubadours and minstrels, celebrating what he has seen and heart and felt in a deceptively simple style reminiscent of the early Sherwood Anderson. . . . Like Anderson, he is a lover, and his affection invests his writing with a singular charm.
I have a tendency sometimes to get too logical with what I'm writing, just because I want it to be kind of perfect.
I don't sit down to write a funny story. Every single thing I sit down to write is meant to be sad.
It's not a matter of old or new forms; a person writes without thinking about any forms, he writes because it flows freely from his soul.
Whenever I write, I try and approach my stories from some kind of universal theme or idea or emotion.
My main reader was my wife Sheila, and I haven't written a lot since she died.
When I'm writing, the darkness is always there. I go where the pain is.
In today's time, writing stuff that actually happened is touch-and-go, because you don't want to be too personal. If you are, then it probably won't relate to a mass audience. A lot of times you have to make it sound like it's about everybody else, but you really went through it.
I think in order to write really well and convincingly, one must be somewhat poisoned by emotion, dislike, displeasure, resentment, fault-finding, imagination, passionate remonstrance, a sense of injustice-they all make fine fuel.
I write with all my heart
My message to anyone who's afraid that they can't write music when they're happy is 'Just trust the passion.' The passion can write a lot of things.
I don't plan anything out, and I don't write in chronological order. The emotional tenor is what guides me, but a lot of it is feeling my way through the dark. That's okay if you have unlimited time to work and stumble upon things in a delightful way, but under a deadline, it can be really stressful.
I write really scathing, angry stuff when I'm in a better mood, and then uplifting and happy stuff when I'm at the absolute bottom.
If you do not hear music in your words, you have put too much thought into your writing and not enough heart.
Sia is like no one else I've ever worked with. She comes completely from this non-logical but very emotional place. I could be wrong, but she doesn't really seem to analyse what she's writing. She doesn't really revise it, but goes with that first thing that comes out.
William Maxwell's my favorite North American writer, I think. And an Irish writer who used to write for 'The New Yorker' called Maeve Brennan, and Mary Lavin, another Irish writer. There were a lot of writers that I found in 'The New Yorker' in the Fifties who wrote about the same type of material I did - about emotions and places.
One of the hardest parts of writing is writing from the gut or the heart or something like that rather than intellectually.
