Jazz Writing Quotes

#1. The French write plays and paint as naturally as we play jazz - it's just a national gift.

Alice B. Toklas

#2. His eyes, if anything, gleamed even more bright, having found the treasure he sought.

Jazz Feylynn

#3. Determined to enshroud his enchantment.

Jazz Feylynn

#4. There's an ecstatic side to writing. It's like jazz. It just has a life.

Alice Walker

#5. I could hear music playing in the background of works by certain authors, like Poe and Shakespeare. And I discovered Nikki Giovanni when I was in eighth grade. Her writing has a musical energy with pulse and rhythm, almost like jazz or hip-hop.

Jill Scott

#6. And what happened was, it's the same thing an older, more successful writer of ficition might say to a student: write about what you know. And what I knew - of course I knew jazz, but I also knew country, blues and some rock and roll. And that came out.

Larry Coryell

#7. Writing is like jazz. It can be learned, but it can't be taught.

Paul Desmond

#8. When I and the other young artists were working in comics, our work carried with it a particularly American slant. After all, we were Americans drawing and writing about things that touched us. As it turned out, the early work was, you might say, a comic book version of Jazz.

Joe Simon

#9. Well, I think writing is basically about time and rhythm. Like with jazz. You have your basic melody and then you just riff off of it. And the riffs are about timing.

Kathy Acker

#10. I set the timer. The silent countdown, with the not-so-silent alarm blast at the end of the twenty-minutes commenced. The ticking and tocking started its merciless countdown.

Jazz Feylynn

#11. My method of writing is to take the most basic kind of line and improvise on it. After all, I am the child of the culture which created Jazz.

Leon Forrest

#12. I closed my own jazz bar so I could be a man who can write novels as I like. I was pleased about that. This pleasure was connected to the pleasure of writing.

Haruki Murakami

#13. I like to know for whom I'm writing - it makes the composition easier to do.

Lalo Schifrin

#14. For me writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz.

Francoise Sagan

#15. His eyes never blinked or wavered from mine, encompassing me in a field of control.

Jazz Feylynn

#16. I'm very much aware in the writing of dialogue, or even in the narrative too, of a rhythm. There has to be a rhythm with it ... Interviewers have said, you like jazz, don't you? Because we can hear it in your writing. And I thought that was a compliment.

Elmore Leonard

#17. Dialogue is a little bit jazz, a little bit hand-to-hand combat.

Chuck Wendig

#18. I assumed this yoke would encase me as well as any another hobble. Only this one bound the mind.

Jazz Feylynn

#19. I write pop songs. But I think it is sprinkled with a lot of counter-culture references. It ranged from rap to hip hop to trip hop, house, drum and bass, and experimental and improv and jazz.

Nelly Furtado

#20. In mid-stroke of word and paper fusion

Jazz Feylynn

#21. Every bloody mark had assassinated my writing along the way.

Jazz Feylynn

#22. I knew all too well the damage of scarlet ink smeared across page-after-page ...

Jazz Feylynn

#23. Composers don't just sit in a room and write things that are in their heads, they actually listen to a lot of music, pop music, jazz, rock and roll, any combination of music that catches their ear.

Hilary Hahn

#24. Before I became a writer, I was running a jazz bar in the center of Tokyo, which means that I worked in filthy air all the time late into the night. I was very excited when I started making a living out of my writing, and I decided, 'I will live in nothing but an absolutely healthy way.'

Haruki Murakami

#25. I have learned as much about writing about my people by listening to blues and jazz and spirituals as I have by reading novels.

Ernest Gaines

#26. We always feel pretty creative as far as writing songs. We write them together; we just get in a room, or on occasion in Flea's garage. We just sort of improvise, like jazz musicians.

Chad Smith

#27. Just because I'm playing Jazz I don't forget about me. I play or write me the way I feel through Jazz.

Charles Mingus

#28. I wrote my first two long novels and an anthology of short narratives, when I was a manager of my own jazz bar. There was not enough time to write and I didn't know how to write novels. Therefore, I made written collages of aphorisms and rags.

Haruki Murakami

#29. I started writing songs when I was 10. It was a natural way to express myself as a kid. It wasn't until I started listening to jazz, joined the choir and picked up a guitar that my little hobby became something far more serious.

Kimbra

#30. I'm sure someone out there has a workable solution. But what do I know? I make comic books and write about jazz. I do know the difference between right and wrong, though.

Harvey Pekar

#31. Jazz is very important. It's not something I can put my finger on. When I'm writing at my favorite time, I like to have the gentle side of Coltrane or Brubeck on the CD player. It creates sort of a spiritual space in which I write best.

Miller Williams

#32. ...teaching is like playing jazz. Even if you perform the same number over and over, it never comes out the same twice, and you don't know exactly how it will sound until you hear it. Teaching is like writing with your voice

Earl R. Babbie