Jazz Writing Quotes

A lot of songs you write are just for exercise - just pencil sharpeners. ~ Harlan Howard

Youths write me and tell me that their band will go nowhere because of all the bad bands in the world. I tell them there has always been awful music and that no great band ever wasted any time complaining, they just got it done. Their ropey ranting is just a way to get out of the hard work of making music that will do some lasting damage. ~ Henry Rollins

Revision means throwing out the boring crap and making what's left sound natural. ~ Laurie Halse Anderson

It's hard for me to show work while I'm writing, because other people's comments will influence what happens. ~ Donna Tartt

There was a spectator in me who, even while I squirmed and obeyed, remained observant, note taking for some future revision. ~ Virginia Woolf

I've just come back from Vegas, and I was in on the caucus process. It's insane. What a mess. And also with these particular candidates who are running, so many times I said, "I just wish Kurt [Vonnegut] were alive." This is like something he would be writing. This is just crazy stuff. I would love to hear his take on it. ~ Susan Sarandon

With Marvel, I obviously don't own the characters, so there are levels of approval to go through. But I'm very seldom told no, and never without reason. Maybe I've just been lucky; I don't know, but I don't think it's as frustrating as people generally imagine. I act as though I own it all while I'm writing, I think. I hope, anyway. ~ Kelly Sue DeConnick

I really look forward to putting on a record. I love writing music and think that may be my strong suit even more than singing. I can't wait to take that music on tour and share it with as many people as I can. ~ James Wolpert

I didn't write my poems because I wanted to, they were wrung from me. I had to write them. ~ Maxine Kumin

When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner's pick, a wood carver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year. ~ Annie Dillard

Some writing courses will advise you to write what you know. I've always thought this is very odd advice ... because it means, for example, that I should not be writing about Nicholas Flamel, because I didn't live in France in the 15th Century, I was not an alchemyst, am not immortal (despite the rumours) and do not know magic. ~ Michael Scott

You have to have an eye and a feeling for where things go. Writing visually, writing textually, writing sonically. Text is visual for me and images are textual. There is power in the way ideas are arranged, not just developed rhetorically. Form is everything. ~ Masha Tupitsyn

I think if a writer is being honest they'd admit to a file full of a dozen or more stories that are all started to varying degrees. They're like the kid who wants to be a firefighter and a police officer and an astronaut. ~ Dan Alatorre

Writing is definitely something that interests me a lot. ~ Rose McIver

A writer who doesn't read is like a director who doesn't watch movies. ~ Kira Hawke

Of course, in fairness, I must remind you of this: that we writers are the most lily-livered of all craftsmen. We expect more, for the most peewee efforts, than any other people. ~ Brenda Ueland

Right from the very beginning, I knew I wanted to write palpably Scottish fiction. ~ Ian Rankin

Dr. S. talked to me about magical thinking. She was right. Much depends on chance, on what we can't control, on others. She did not say that writing to Boris was a bad idea, but then she never judged anything. That was her magic. [p. 85] ~ Siri Hustvedt

Every year hundreds of books, many of considerable merit, pass unnoticed. Each one has taken the author months to write, he may have had it in his mind for years; he has put into it something of himself which is lost forever, it is heart-rending to think how great are the chances that it will be disregarded. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

...each day I sit down in purposeful concentration to write in a notebook, some sentences on a buried truth, an unnamed reality, things that happened but are denied. It is hard to describe the stillness it takes, the difficulty of this act. It requires an almost perfect concentration which I am trying to learn and there is no way to learn it that is spelled out anywhere or so I can understand it but I have a sense that it's completely simply, on the order of being able to sit still and keep your mind dead center in you without apology or fear. I squirm after some time but it ain't boredom, it's fear of what's possible, how much you can know if you can be quiet enough and simple enough. I move around, my mind wanders, I lose the ability to take words and roll them through my brain, move with them into their interiors, feel their colors, touch what's under them, where they come from long ago and way back. I get frightened seeing what's in my own mind if words get put to it. There's a light there, it's bright, it's wide, it could make you blind if you look direct into it and so I turn away, afraid; I get frightened and I run and the only way to run is to abandon the process altogether or compromise it beyond recognition. I think about Celine sitting with his shit, for instance; I don't know why he didn't run, he should've. It's a quality you have to have of being near mad and at the same time so quiet in your heart that you could pass for a spiritual warrior; you could probably ~ Andrea Dworkin

Hold fast to the Bible as the sheet-anchor of your liberties; write its precepts in your hearts, and practice them in your lives. ~ Ulysses S. Grant

I've published one book before, and now I'm writing a book of essays and stories about life in Tokyo. And I have one book coming out in May in Germany, about fitness. ~ Franka Potente

And then simultaneously I don't think they're asking you to necessarily write in stone that this is what you're going to do or what you have to do. ~ Bryan Burk

As an actor you get categorized by other people, but it's not like I arrange myself into comedy mode or serious mode. If it's good writing you just have to play it true - if it's funny, it's funny. But obviously you don't want it to be amusing if you're playing Hedda Gabler! ~ Sophie Thompson

Writing is a series of verbal suggestions designed to provoke a psychological reaction and an aesthetic experience. ~ Stewart Stafford

If it gets to a situation where it turns into a debate, look, the person that I'm debating is the person that is writing the story or presenting the broadcast. They're not going to write the story in such a way that shows they lost. ~ Josh Earnest

It's four in the morning, the end of december
I'm writing you now just to see if you're better. ~ Leonard Cohen

For me, I prefer to work on my own. I feel like I can tap into a more genuine place, and I feel like my best stuff comes from writing on my own in my own zone. ~ Tinashe

Writing was something I always liked, but it wasn't a career until I was laid off from my executive position in my 30s. I started a website because I was bored, unemployed and angry. ~ Jen Lancaster

Looking at old photographs inundates you with a flood of nostalgic emotions! And you can't be sure where you want to swim in the deluge of memories! ~ Avijeet Das

In America there's a tendency to write the same book over and over because that's what sells. So in a way, my success in America has come at the expense of what I do. I haven't sold out, and I haven't taken the popular road to writing a best-selling book. I've really bucked the system. So it was necessary for me not to go and find the easy fans, the ones who want something digestible and fast with a happy ending that they can read over and over again no matter how many different books it is. I had to find fans who really wanted to think. Worldwide they all have that in common. ~ Steven Tyler

Why am I writing books in my old age? Who am I trying to impress? Why go on? the answer is fear of golf. ~ David Taylor

Every child should be taught how to read, write and think. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Oral teaching was to a great extent ruled out; a large number of books on many subjects were set for reading in morning school-hours; so much work was set that there was only time for a single reading; all reading was tested by a narration of the whole or a given passage, whether orally or in writing. Children working on these lines know months after that which they have read and are remarkable for their power of concentration (attention); they have little trouble with spelling or composition and become well-informed, intelligent persons. ~ Charlotte Mason, Towards A Philosophy Of Education

Do not, therefore, say "I feel nauseous," unless you are sure you have that effect on others. ~ William Strunk Jr.

Jazz of the sort we play is a happy, extroverted music. You don't have to think about it too much. ~ Chris Barber

All of these declarations of what writing ought to be, which I had myself-though, thank God I had never committed them to paper-I think are nonsense. You write what you write, and then either it holds up or it doesn't hold up. There are no rules or particular sensibilities. I don't believe in that at all anymore. ~ Jamaica Kincaid

I see so many bands, that are trying really hard to write for a person that they've never met. I get the idea behind it and the idea of helping people, but I feel you help people more by exposing yourself. ~ Andy Biersack

As long as one person reads the bullshit I put on paper, and likes it, i'll keep writing. ~ Benjamin Bayani

Writing is just building a new world – one character, one place, one maniac at a time. ~ Carla H. Krueger

Any experience that isn't fun is probably something I will at least use in my writing someday. ~ Alex Flinn

But we were chumps and we knew it. As makers of sentences we were practically fetal, beneath notice, unlaunched, fooling around in our spare time or on somebody else's dime. Nobody loved our sentences as we loved them, and so they congealed or grew sour on our tongues.
We barely glanced at our wall-scribblings for fear of what a few weeks or even hours might expose in our infatuations. Our photocopied fortune slips we'd find in muddy clogs in storm drains, tangled with advertising flyers, unheeded.
Our manuscripts? Those were unspeakable secrets, kept not only from the world but from each other.
My pages were shameful, occluded everywhere with xxxxxx's of regret. I scurried to read Clea's manuscript every time she left the apartment but never confessed that I even knew it existed.
Her title was "Those Young Rangers Thought Love Was a Scandal Like a Bald White Head." Mine was "I Heard the Laughter of the Sidemen from Behind Their Instruments. ~ Jonathan Lethem