Overhear Quotes

Writing a first draft is like groping one's way into a dark room, or overhearing a faint conversation, or telling a joke whose punchline you've forgotten. As someone said, one writes mainly to rewrite, for rewriting and revising are how one's mind comes to inhabit the material fully.

In a city where you walk around, it's impossible to plan your day and your life as accidents will happen, you'll overhear things, bump into people, and take unexpected turns.

I want to overhear passionate arguments about what we are and what we are doing and what we ought to do. I want to feel that art is an utterance made in good faith by one human being to another. I want to believe there are geniuses scheming to astonish the rest of us, just for the pleasure of it.

If you feel irritated by the absurd remarks of two people whose conversation you happen to overhear, you should imagine that you are listening to a dialogue of two fools in a comedy.

My discussion with Keith Richards about the creative process led me to believe that there's an invisible presence of a stream of ever-flowing creativity that we overhear-all you have to do is pull up the antenna and dial it in. This presence allows you to maintain your sense of origin and move forward.

I think forums are great. It's a weird thing to overhear a conversation about yourself. But, the bottom line is that these people are really interested; they get the image and they get very opinionated and it turns into squabbles. You know that's human nature, that's life.

Shakespeare will not make us better, and he will not make us worse, but he may teach us how to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves... he may teach us how to accept change in ourselves as in others, and perhaps even the final form of change.

Entranced by the denotative power of words to define, to order, to represent the things around us, weve overlooked the songful dimension of language so obvious to our oral [storytelling] ancestors. Weve lost our ear for the music of language -- for the rhythmic, melodic layer of speech by which earthly things overhear us.

Poetry is the art of overhearing ourselves say things from which it is impossible to retreat.

How charmed I am when I overhear a German word which I understand!

Perhaps, as some wit remarked, the best proof that there is Intelligent Life in Outer Space is the fact it hasn't come here. Well, it can't hide forever - one day we will overhear it.

We'd go to the fraternity house. It was a good place to practice. But we really wanted the kids to overhear us. And whoever heard us would go nuts over it.

What women will say to other women grumbling in their kitchens and complaining and gossiping or what they make clear in their masochism is often the last thing they will say aloud - a man may overhear. Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life --and one is as good as the other.

District 12. Where you can starve to death in safety," I mutter. Then I glance quickly over my shoulder. Even here, in the middle of nowhere, you worry someone might overhear you.

A poem needs disguises. It needs secrets. It thrives on the tension between what is said and not said; it prefers the oblique, the implied, the ironic, the suggestive; when it speaks, it wants you to lean forward a little to overhear; it wants you to understand things only years later.

It is true that you may occasionally overhear a mother say Children must have their naps, It's mother who knows best. When what she really means by that Is that she needs a rest.

Signs usually come in threes. The same book is recommended to you several times within the space of a day, for example. You overhear someone mention the same company three times in a week. Or, you get the same feeling again and again. Notice your feelings. Again, true divine guidance feels safe, even if it does feel intimidating. False guidance feels edgy, shaky - like you're sneaking under the wire. It doesn't feel right.

[The writer] must essentially draw from life as he sees it, lives it, overhears it or steals it, and the truer the writer, perhaps the bigger the blackguard. He lives by biting the hand that feeds him.

That is what all poets do: they talk to themselves out loud;

and the world overhears them. But it's horribly lonely not to hear someone else talk sometimes.

The main condition is that the spiritual ear should be open to overhear and patiently take in, and the will ready to obey that testimony which, I believe, God bears in every human heart, however dull, to those great truths which the Bible reveals. This, and not logic, is the way to grow in religious knowledge, to know that the truths of religion are not shadows, but deep realities.

Poetry is often the art of overhearing yourself say things you didn't know you knew. It is a learned skill to force yourself to articulate your life, your present world or your possibilities for the future.

But, yeah, I'm really happy when I'm writing.

When I'm being creative and when I have something that I can put down. You know, if you go out and you overhear a conversation or you have a thought, you have a receptacle to go home and say, 'Oh, this would be great in this script.' Your antenna's out in a different way, and I love that time.

Every time you overhear something hurtful, I want you to do something kind for someone else.

In the homes of many Western Christians, hours are sometimes spent listening to worldly music. In our homes loud music can also be heard, but it is only to cover the talk about the gospel and the underground work so that neighbors may not overhear it and inform the secret police. How underground Christians rejoice on those rare occasions when they meet a serious Christian from the West!

Once you're into a story everything seems to apply-what you overhear on a city bus is exactly what your character would say on the page you're writing. Wherever you go, you meet part of your story.

A poem is a private story, after all, no matter how apparently public.

The reader is always overhearing a confession.

What I would give, I thought, to have been present as Elizabeth Keckley measured Mary Lincoln for a new gown, to overhear their conversations on topics significant and ordinary, to observe the Lincoln White House from such an intimate perspective. From that moment, my interest in their remarkable friendship was captivated, and it never really waned.

Once I have the idea for a story. I start collecting all kinds of helpful information and storing it in three-ring notebooks. For example, I may see a picture of a man in a magazine and say, 'That's exactly what the father in my book looks like!'...I save everything that will help--maps, articles, hand-jotted notes, bits of dialogue from conversations that I overhear.

You don’t read or overhear the voice in the poem, you are the voice in the poem.

It’s quite easy to accidentally overhear people talking downstairs if you hold an upturned glass to the floorboards and accidentally put your ear to it.

His gaze was a lot steadier than her heartbeat.

“She’s the reason for those whispered phone calls I used to overhear, isn’t she?” “Don’t be silly. I was talking to my lover.” “She told me she lives at a place called Brookdale. After I hung up, I did a little research on the Web. Your talent for obfuscation continues to amaze me.” “Hey, I haven’t obfuscated in weeks. Makes you go blind.

When I write, I don't translate for white readers.

... Dostoevski wrote for a Russian audience, but we're able to read him. If I'm specific, and I don't overexplain, then anyone can overhear me.