Quotes by Writing I'm not really a full-time director, I just like to direct the things that I write because I think I'm going to know it better than someone else. Billy Bob Thornton writingdirectorsthinking I write songs on guitar and that's about how good of a guitar player I am. I can write songs on it. Billy Bob Thornton playerwritingsong Usually with film writing I start with characters, and set about writing their story. Billy Bob Thornton storieswritingcharacter I generally have lyrics first, but you can't help that when you're writing lyrics you start to get a melody in your head. So they come kind of simultaneously. Billy Bob Thornton writinghelpingfirsts If you want anybody to have a different voice, you really have to visualize and hear the voices of all these people. Sometimes when I write with specific actors in mind, it helps. Billy Bob Thornton voicewritingpeople My songs aren't built around choruses or hooks or anything like that. That's kind of how I write screenplays too. Billy Bob Thornton hookwritingsong People think you have to be tortured or miserable to write, but I'm finding that I get inspired a lot more these days before I'm happy. Billy Bob Thornton writingpeoplethinking Acting is playing - it's actually going out on a playground with the other kids and being in the game, and I need that. Writing satisfies that part of myself that longs to sit in my room and dream. Billy Bob Thornton dreamwritingkids I'd like to win a Booker Prize for writing. A Nobel Peace Prize for my work in peace... and I think that'll probably do. Billy Boyd winningwritingthinking I was probably about fourteen I think, and probably like every boy who's fourteen that writes a song, it was about a girl. It was about a girl who I really liked, but she didn't like me as much as I liked her. I think most guys go through that. Billy Boyd girlwritingsong I try and write honestly about what I see around me now. Billy Bragg honestwritingtrying There are quite a few honest songwriters out there writing about relationships and their own personality traits. But for some reason, once they step out of the bedroom, their honesty doesn't seem to come with them. Billy Bragg honestypersonalitywriting I don't mind being labeled as a political songwriter. I've chosen to do that. What really annoys me is being dismissed as a political songwriter. That really pains me, because life isn't all about love; it's not all about politics, either. It's a beautiful mixture of events that absolutely baffle you, and you think, "Why can't I do something about that?", whether those events are in your bedroom, or out there in the wide world. In our daily lives we engage with them at different times, and I'm trying to write about the whole human experience, or my perspective on it anyway. Billy Bragg painwritingbeautiful I think if you're going to make political art, you have to engage at some level. You can't just write about politics, you have to try and be politics as well. Billy Bragg writingartthinking Write the poem only you can write. Billy Collins writing The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. But the real question is, 'What happens to the reader once he or she gets inside the poem?' That's the real question for me, is getting the reader into the poem and then taking the reader somewhere, because I think of poetry as a kind of form of travel writing. Billy Collins realwritingthinking I'm speaking to someone I'm trying to get to fall in love with me. I'm trying to speak intimately to one person. That should be clear. I'm not speaking to an audience. I'm not writing for the podium. I'm just writing, trying to write in a fairly quiet tone to one other reader who is by herself, or himself, and I'm trying to interrupt some silence in their life, which is utterance. Billy Collins falling-in-lovesilencewriting You come by your style by learning what to leave out. At first you tend to overwrite—embellishment instead of insight. You either continue to write puerile bilge, or you change. In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice. Billy Collins stylevoicewriting I was influenced by the Beats because I actually just began to commit adolescence around 1955, when "Howl" and Rebel Without a Cause and a lot of other new things were popping up. (Again I'm trying to give you a finite version of this career.) And then I came under the sway of Wallace Stevens when I was in college and graduate school, and basically set as a life goal the ambition of writing third-rate Wallace Stevens. I thought I would be completely content if I was recognized at some later point in my life as a third-rate Wallace Stevens. Billy Collins ambitionwritingschool And the reason I am writing this on the back of a manila envelope now that they have left the train together is to tell you that when she turned to lift the large, delicate cello onto the overhead rack, I saw him looking up at her and what she was doing the way the eyes of saints are painted when they are looking up at God when he is doing something remarkable, something that identifies him as God. Billy Collins eyetogetherwriting«152153154155156157158159160161162»
