You need not expect to get your book right the first time. Go to work and revamp or rewrite it. God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. These are God's adjectives. You thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by.
I agree with Balzac and 19th-century writers, black and white, who say, 'I write for money.' Yes, I think everybody should be paid handsomely; I insist on it, and I pay people who work for me, or with me, handsomely.
No matter where; of comfort no man speak: Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs; Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth
I think for many songwriter/performers, you need to go off by yourself and write the songs to begin with, but then you need people to bring them to life. So you have to be comfortable with solitude and also with being very social.
This is going to sound nuts but it took me forever to figure out why I'd stopped writing poetry - I mean, I went about a decade where I wrote very little poetry and I thought it was because I was doing a weekly blog. And then when we moved, I reconfigured my writing desk. The previous one had had very little space to write by hand. And suddenly, the poetry was gushing!
I have just been to a city in the West, a city full of poets, a city they have made safe for poets. The whole city is so lovely that you do not have to write it up to make it poetry; it is ready-made for you. But, I don't know - the poetry written in that city might not seem like poetry if read outside of the city. It would be like the jokes made when you were drunk; you have to get drunk again to appreciate them.
Write to me frequently & the longest letters possible; never mind whether you have facts or no to communicate; fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.
The only way to get love is to be lovable. It's very irritating if you have a lot of money. You'd like to think you could write a check: "I'll buy a million dollars' worth of love." But it doesn't work that way. The more you give love away, the more you get.
Christ is the most unique person of history. No man can write a history of the human race without giving first and foremost place to the penniless Teacher of Nazareth.
Poetry is a way for me to explore a tingly feeling, to let it play itself out, and also to map it. I feel like I'm making little star maps when I write poems.
I had neither expert aid nor advice. I studied no courses in writing; until a year or so ago, I never read a book by anybody advising writers how to write.