Writing is a intensely personal activity. I can pen down my best thoughts when I'm alone. But when one is elevated into the stature of an author, you have to think about your books in terms of their business angle.
When I turned 45, I lay in bed reflecting on all life had taught me. My soul sprang a leak and ideas flowed out. My pen simply caught them and set the words on paper. I typed them up and turned them into a newspaper column of the 45 lessons life taught me. When I hit 50, I added five more lessons and the paper ran the column again.
With a pen in my hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunication have been repulsed.
The one ironclad rule is that I have to try. I have to walk into my writing room and pick up my pen every weekday morning.
In composing, as a general rule, run your pen through every other word you have written; you have no idea what vigor it will give your style.
There are two powers in the world; one is the sword and the other is the pen. There is a great competition and rivalry between the two. There is a third power stronger than both, that of the women.
No pen can give an adequate description of the all-pervading corruption produced by slavery.
There is something magical in seeing what you can do, what texture and tone and colour you can produce merely with a pen point and a bottle of ink.
I used the pen name because I knew I wanted to write better novels under my own name someday.
The strokes of the pen need deliberation as much as the sword needs swiftness.
Whether it's digital or physical, a pencil or a pen: line work. Humans are making things. And out of that comes the entire designed world we live within.
If you want a transcript of tonight's program, get a pen and write down everything I said.
But this is neither here nor there why do I mention it? Ask my pen, it governs me, I govern not it.
Fame lost its appeal for me when I went into a public restroom and an autograph seeker handed me a pen and paper under the stall door.
The pen is mightier than the sword if the sword is very short, and the pen is very sharp.
Under Obama, our federal tax dollars can now be used to fund abortion all over the world. With the stroke of a pen, abortion essentially became a U.S. foreign export.
In this manner, I continued with Satan for ten days. His answer and blasphemy were too shocking to pen; till I was worn out with rage and malice against him, I could not bear myself.
I always have a good pen with me.
These deserters were our undoing. I shall have a good deal more to say about them before I finally lay down my pen, and I shall not hesitate to call them by their true name, the name with which they will be for ever branded before all the nations of the world.
To be a novelist, all I need is a pen and a piece of paper.
When we put the pen to paper, we articulate things in our life that we may have felt vague about. Before you write about something, somebody says, 'How do you feel?' and you say, 'Oh, I feel okay.' Then you write about it, and you discover you don't feel okay.
I am violently untidy. My desk is overcrowded. I write my first drafts in longhand in a long notebook using a plastic throwaway fountain pen. Then I work on a word processor using a different desk and a different room.
Writers are people who put pen to paper every day.
Inflated descriptions by the pen or exaggerated illustrations by the pencil.
A street criminal can steal only what he can carry, but with a stroke of a pen, the dialing of a telephone or the pushing of a computer key, the white collar criminal can and does steal billions.
Letter writing was clearly important to Reagan. Even as president he kept dashing off letters to friends, pen pals, media people, statesmen, critics, and the kind of people who write to presidents never expecting a reply.
The only way you'll have a pen of potential Romeos from your past to choose from is to actually have a past.
The word processor is a better tool than a quill pen because you can do so much more with it, but on the other hand, what you have to say and how you say it is the ultimate determination.
The idea of a pseudonym had been flitting around my brain for a long time, along with its cognate, disappearance. In the 1980s, I published some poems under a pen name in a literary magazine to see what it would feel like. It was fun. It was even a little thrilling.
My writing routine is: get son off to school and sit down at 8 A.M. I read what I wrote the day before, and then write longhand, into a notebook. I prefer paper and pen because it feels closer to my brain.
I was writing fantasy as soon as I could hold a pen.
There are two projects facing each other. There's Marine Le Pen's project of a fractured, closed France. On the other hand, you have my project which is a republican, patriotic project aiming at... reconciling France.
After all these years, I definitely associate having a pen in my hand with having an ashtray just out of eye line.
A nation's poets are its true owners; and by the stroke of the pen they convey the title-deeds of its real possessions to strangers and aliens.
I don't write directly on to the computer because I don't think well facing forward with fingers on a keyboard. I think better looking down holding a pen. And the concentration quotient of pen and paper is higher than when I'm moving words around on screen.
Nobody worked harder than Mozart. By the time he was twenty-eight years old, his hands were deformed because of all the hours he had spent practicing, performing, and gripping a quill pen to compose. That's the missing element in the popular portrait of Mozart.
