top of page
Exlpore more Writing quotes

"A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn't telling, or teaching, or ordering. Rather, he seeks to establish a relationship with meaning, of feeling, of observing. We are lonesome animals. We spend all our live trying to be less lonesome. And one of our ancient methods is to tell a story, begging the listener to say, and to feel, "Yes, that's the way it is, or at least that's the way I feel it. You're not as alone as you thought." To finish is sadness to a writer, a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. But it isn't really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done."

"Certainly the plagiarism, and dealing with the fallout of it, was the most difficult thing I've ever faced since I started writing."

"Bad writing is more than a matter of shit syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do- to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street."

"T[he rules of writing] require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others."

"I believe the first draft of a book - even a long one - should take no more than three months. Any longer and - for me, at least - the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave duiring a period of severe sunspot activity."

"Some people write letters, in the library."

"In the middle section of the book Mirabelle breaks into not one, but two houses near Belgravia Books. I had fun scoping these out - checking which windows looked least secure and figuring out how to scale the mews houses to the rear to get her inside. A man came out at one point, 'What are you doing?' he questioned me. 'The thing is, I'm writing a book,' I started with a smile. He waved me off, his hand as wide as a tennis racket. 'Everyone is writing a book, my dear,' he said. Between you and I, it's his house that MIrabelle ends up breaking into."
Explore more quotes by Gene Ween

"I wrote most of these songs right before the end. A lot of these songs are about that. Even if it's not direct, you can feel the beginning of the end of the breakup in these songs."

"I'm a very big Notorious B.I.G. fan and I do an imitation of him that always cracks everybody up."

"We sold a certain, steady amount of product for them and they could count on it. When it came time to ask for the money for this new record, they dropped us. It was fine with us. It was a dead fish."

"A lot of those songs are actually about Sarah, who I was recently divorced from about five or six months ago. I'd been seeing her off and on since I was about nineteen, so a lot of those songs are about her."

"Most of our fans seem to be very intelligent people who don't stand out too much, but they're still total freaks. I like that - they're smart and sadistic, which I think is a reflection at us."

"We are going to put out a boxed set thing, but I don't want to do it yet. I want to wait until we're 45 and we're bitter and broke. Then, we'll put out the comprehensive Ween boxed set."
bottom of page