Writing When I Go Back Quotes & Sayings

Like most writers, I look back on all of my finished works with utter regret, and the trouble with writing a series of novels is that you have to go back and read them, and make sure that you haven't forgotten anything you've created, and then when you do that, you're faced with your own mistakes on every trick, from the wrong word in places to entirely the wrong incident. — Daniel Handler

A logic proof is: you get a starting point and an ending point, and you have to get there through all these different steps and tautologies. I approach novel writing that way. When I get to the end I have to go back and connect everything. — Heidi Julavits

I write a lot from instinct. But as you're writing out of instinct, once you reach a certain level as a songwriter, the craft is always there talking to you in the back of your head ... that tells you when it's time to go to the chorus, when it's time to rhyme. Real basic craft ... it's second nature. — Janis Ian

When we've finished the current tour I'm going to go back to Italy and see if I can do some more writing. — Gerry Mulligan

When I don't make any progress, it is because I have bumped into the wall of language. Then I draw back with a bloody head. And would like to go on. — Karl Kraus

I was dying, of course, but then we all are. Every day, in perfect increments, I was dying of loss.
The only help for my condition, then as now, is that I refused to let go of what I loved. I wrote everything down, at first in choppy fragments; a sentence here, a few words there, it was the most I could handle at the time. Later I wrote more, my grief muffled but not eased by the passage of time.
When I go back over my writing now I can barely read it. The happiness is the worst. Some days I can't bring myself to remember. But I will not relinquish a single detail of the past. What remains of my life depends on what happened six years ago.
In my brain, in my limbs, in my dreams, it is still happening. — Meg Rosoff

Tell him I said that he will know when he's my age that books aren't written on whims or old promises. Books are written on years turned inside out by ideas that never let go until you get them in print, and even then writing's a last resort, a desperate ransom you pay to get your life back. — Richard Bach

I am a morning writer; I am writing at eight-thirty in longhand and I keep at it until twelve-thirty, when I go for a swim. Then I come back, have lunch, and read in the afternoon until I take my walk for the next day's writing. — Carlos Fuentes

I discovered John Truby ten years ago when a friend told me about his screenwriting course. I studied Truby's principles for a year and
using them
I wrote the first draft of The Thieves of Ostia in two weeks. I go back to his teachings before each new book I write. Each time I study Truby, I learn something new. — Caroline Lawrence

I edit as I go. Especially when I go to commit it to paper. I prefer a typewriter even to a computer. I don't like it. There's no noise on the computer. I like a typewriter because I am such a slow typist. I edit as I am committing it to paper. I like to see the words before me and I go, "Yeah, that's it." They appear before me and they fit. I don't usually take large parts out. If I get stuck early in a song, I take it as a sign that I might be writing the chorus and don't know it. Sometimes,you gotta step back a little bit and take a look at what you're doing. — John Prine

It's a real testament to the amount of skill and talent involved, across the board, whether it's the production design, the construction, the costume design, the other actors, the way it's shot, the directors we had on it, or obviously John's writing. When things do go well, it sometimes seems easy, in a weird way, but it's actually down to a lot of cogs working in a big machine. But, I'm certainly happy to be going back. I'm excited to carry on. — Harry Treadaway

My work is very dear to me, and certainly I have had all the emotional highs and lows that go with trying to get it to an audience. But I do have some kind of detachment that seems somewhat unusual in my trade. I'm a writer who writes every day. I don't have a period of months where I can't get anything done and I wander around tearing my hair out. When I come back from a book tour, for instance, I might have one day where I sleep late and then check my e-mail, and then go for a walk, and then the next day I'm really itching to get back at writing a story. — Daniel Handler

I grew up in a home filled with music and had an early appreciation of jazz since my dad was a jazz musician. Beginning at around age three I started singing with his band and jazz music has continued to be one of my three passions along with acting and writing. I like to say jazz music is my musical equivalent of comfort food. It's always where I go back to when I want to feel grounded, — Molly Ringwald

I would never sit and write a song in front of anyone, because you're so vulnerable. I don't know at what point in the process that it becomes acceptable to pass them on. When a song wants to be written, it will be written. When it does come, I will very rarely go back and edit lyrics. I'm quite a rational human being, and the only part of my life that I can't rationalise, or can't make sense of, is how a song gets written or why. — Laura Marling

I have a notebook that I take with me everywhere. I free-write in it when there are situations that I know I can write a song about. I will just start writing everything that I can think of while trying to write some things that are kind of poetic or sound like they could be in a song. Then, after the music is written, I go back and look at my subjects to see which one I think woud go with what music. Then, I formulate it into a melody and get the song. — Agent M

I didn't leave that crowd of ocelots to go back into it." [when asked to write the film script for The Osterman Weekend] — Robert Ludlum

It was then that I saw the business of writing for what it truly was and is to me. It is your penance for not being lucky. It is an attempt to reach others and to make them love you. It is your instinctive protest, when you find you have no voice at the world's tribunals, and that no one will speak for you. I would give my entire output of words, past, present and to come, in exchange for easier access to the world, for permission to state "I hurt" or " I hate" or " I want". Or indeed, "Look at me". And I do not go back on this. For once a thing is known it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten. And writing is the enemy of forgetfulness, or thoughtlessness. For the writer there is no oblivion. Only endless memory. — Anita Brookner

I use an IBM Thinkpad. I just use it like a typewriter, but when I started using it in 1987, I thought I won't be able to write anymore, so I thought I'd go back to the typewriter. But you couldn't go back to the typewriter after using the computer. — Joan Didion

If you spend enough time reading or writing, you find a voice, but you also find certain tastes. You find certain writers who when they write, it makes your own brain voice like a tuning fork, and you just resonate with them. And when that happens, reading those writers - not all of whom are modern ... I mean, if you are willing to make allowances for the way English has changed, you can go way, way back with this - becomes a source of unbelievable joy. It's like eating candy for the soul. So probably the smart thing to say is that lucky people develop a relationship with a certain kind of art that becomes spiritual, almost religious, and doesn't mean, you know, church stuff, but it means you're just never the same. — David Foster Wallace

Woman, where are they? Has no one judged you guilty?"
She answers "No one, sir."
Then Jesus says, "I also don't judge you guilty. You may go now, but don't sin anymore."
If you have ever wondered how God reacts when you fail, frame these words and hang them on the wall.Read them. Ponder them.Drink from them. Stand below them and let them wash over your soul.
Or better still, take him with you to to your canyon of shame. Invite Christ to journey with you back to the Fremont Bridge of your world. Let Him stand beside you as you retell the events of the darkest nights of your soul.
And then listen. Listen carefully. He's speaking.
"I don't judge you guilty."
And watch. Watch carefully. He's writing. He's leaving a message. Not in the sand, but on a cross.
Not with his hand, but with his blood.
His message has two words: not guilty. — Max Lucado

When I used to play golf. It's a terrible miserable game. It's incredibly frustrating. In 18 holes you make 150 horrible shots off in the woods, in the water ... You make one good shot and it brings you back the next time. With writing a long book there has to be at least one bit that has some magic in it that you can go back to. — Alan Lightman

When I hit a block, regardless of what I am writing, what the subject matter is, or what's going on in the plot, I go back and I read Pablo Neruda's poetry. I don't actually speak Spanish, so I read it translation. But I always go back to Neruda. I don't know why, but it calms me, calms my brain. — Tea Obreht

It seems the best work I do is when I am really allowing the unconscious to rule the page and then later I can go back and hack around and make sense of things ... — Aimee Bender

I've always been a quitter. I quit the Boy Scouts, the glee club, the marching band. Gave up my paper route, turned my back on the church, stuffed the basketball team. I dropped out of college, sidestepped the army with a 4-F on the grounds of mental instability, went back to school, made a go of it, entered a Ph.D. program in nineteenth-century British literature, sat in the front row, took notes assiduously, bought a pair of horn-rims, and quit on the eve of my comprehensive exams. I got married, separated, divorced. Quit smoking, quit jogging, quit eating red meat. I quit jobs: digging graves, pumping gas, selling insurance, showing pornographic films in an art theater in Boston. When I was nineteen I made frantic love to a pinch-faced, sack-bosomed girl I'd known from high school. She got pregnant. I quit town. — T.C. Boyle

A man is a fool not to put everything he has, at any given moment, into what he is creating. You're there now doing the thing on paper. You're not killing the goose, you're just producing an egg. So I don't worry about inspiration, or anything like that. It's a matter of just sitting down and working. I have never had the problem of a writing block. I've heard about it. I've felt reluctant to write on some days, for whole weeks, or sometimes even longer. I'd much rather go fishing, for example, or go sharpen pencils, or go swimming, or what not. But, later, coming back and reading what I have produced, I am unable to detect the difference between what came easily and when I had to sit down and say, "Well, now it's writing time and now I'll write." There's no difference on paper between the two. — Frank Herbert

When I was in college, I wrote poetry very seriously, and then once I had started writing short stories, I didn't go back to poetry, partially because I felt like I understood how incredibly difficult it was. — Elizabeth McCracken

My own words, when I am at work on a story, I hear too as they go, in the same voice that I hear when I read in books. When I write and the sound of it comes back to my ears, then I act to make changes. I have always trusted this voice. — Eudora Welty

It was unaccountable not to be obliged to go out to see her, not to have any occasion to be tormenting myself about her, not to have to write to her, not to be scheming and devising opportunities of being alone with her. Sometimes, of an evening, when I looked up from my writing, and saw her seated opposite, I would lean back in my chair, and think how queer it was that there we were, alone together as a matter of course - nobody's business any more - all the romance of our engagement put away on a shelf, to rust - no one to please but one another - one another to please, for life. — Charles Dickens

It's the typical mid-life crisis kind of thing, where you just stop and wonder, 'Should I go back to university and get a law degree?' I kind of looked around me and thought, 'What kind of idiot am I that I've just spent the last 10 years writing novels? Financially, I'm pretty much where I was when I was 28.' — Lynn Coady

When I was younger I used to get my best writing done at night, but now it has to be during the day. I usually finish work at half past seven, then go back to the house to open a bottle of wine, have dinner, and then read or watch television. — Antony Beevor

I got so discouraged, I almost stopped writing. It was my 12-year-old son who changed my mind when he said to me, "Mother, you've been very cross and edgy with us and we notice you haven't been writing. We wish you'd go back to the typewriter. That did a lot of good for my false guilts about spending so much time writing. At that point, I acknowledged that I am a writer and even if I were never published again, that's what I am." — Madeleine L'Engle

Memory implies that there is some static time and place you can go back to, whereas if you relive it by trying to put yourself back in that context, its more nuanced, less black and white. More traumatic, but also more exciting. When I knew I had to write about things that would be painful, I put off doing it for ages. But then eventually the fear of not doing it becomes greater than the fear of doing it. — Damian Barr

I've never been satisfied or even pleased with a film that I've done. I make them, I'm finished, I've never looked at one after. I don't like them because there's a big gap between what you conceive in your mind when you're writing and you don't have to meet the test of reality. You're home, you write and it's funny and beautiful and romantic and dramatic, and then you have to show up on a cold morning, and you don't have enough of this and this goes wrong and you make the wrong choice on something and you screwed up and you can't go back. — Woody Allen

When I was writing the first few books, what I would do is write a bunch of sentences and then go back and expand and explode those sentences, pack as much into them as I could, so they'd kind of be like popcorn kernels popping ... all this stuff in there to make the writing dense, and beautiful for its density. — William T. Vollmann

When I hear a great new record, especially when it's by someone that I respect and admire, then a part of me is like, Why didn't I think of that? Why didn't I write that record? It makes you sick, but in a way it can be a great thing. It makes you want to go back to the lab and start writing again. Maybe it will inspire you to try a little harder. — Beyonce Knowles

I guess it would be if I wanted to, just lay back and predominantly write songs when I can't go on a stage anymore. — Jimi Hendrix

The operation would be in a week...I didn't know if I would survive. How I longed to go back to reading! There was nowhere I longed to be more than the university campus. I was preparing for a master's on fantasy literature. I was interested in why the country's literature did not include this distinctive genre. I had this great passion for studying and writing, which they explained in my household with the story of the umbilical cord. When I was born, and at my father's request, my elder sister buried my umbilical cord in the courtyard of her primary school. My father attributed my {brother's} academic failure to the fact that my mother buried his umbilical cord in the garden of our house. — Hassan Blasim

I've read somewhere that when you're writing, you should stop while you're doing well so you always want to go back to work. — Glenn Frey

You find yourself by losing yourself. By not thinking about yourself all of the time. When I am in a slump with my writing, I'll go and walk for a week. Walk and not see a human being. Something happens after four or five days which is quite wonderful. It is an ancient thing. Your sense of smell. Your hearing. They come back. — Doug Peacock