Write Me Off Quotes & Sayings

If Russians knew how to read they would write me off. — Catherine The Great

Maybe John will come with me wherever it is I go, but whenever I picture the open highway, my only companion is a box of mix tapes. I decide to write a new story for Monday, one that looks to the future rather then the past, about a woman who starts a new life by making off with a stolen sports car, an Alfa Romeo spider convertible, and she drives west from Jersey to California, robbing banks and evading the law and breaking stereotypes and hearts. — Michael Kardos

Lead me, guide me to the light of your paper. Keep me in your arc of acuity. And when the ream is spent. Write a poem on my back. I'll never wash it off. — C.D. Wright

When I got laid off, I would write my friends these 15-page-long emails. This was before people had personal emails, and my friends would tell me that I was going to get them fired if I kept sending them stuff, so I started a website. — Jen Lancaster

Write something about me then,' he said when I came back. He grinned. 'Go on! Now! I bet you can!'
'I don't do portraits, Choe.'
The lies liberated from this statement skittered off into infinity like images between two mirrors. — M. John Harrison

Songwriters always reminded me of that kid at school who would go around with his guitar, like, 'Yeah, songwritin' man,' looking wistful. That wasn't me - those kinds of people put me off. In the early days, I'd write a bunch of lyrics and almost look at them as a sort of joke, to make the rest of the boys laugh. — Alex Turner

In third period Math, we were forced to sit in alphabetical order. Which put me right behind Logan, who was throwing all those passes to Aiden in the scrimmage. He took off his navy blazer and when he leaned forward to write, I could see muscles bulging across his back and shoulders. I can already tell Math is going to suck, but at least I'll have a nice view.
It's like what Grandpa always says about real estate. Location, location, location. — Jillian Dodd

This was what I came to found. The conquest of loneliness was the missing link that was one day going to make a decent novelist out of me. If you are out here and cannot close off the loves and hates of all that back there in the real world the memories will overtake you and swamp you and wilt your tenacity. Tenacity stamina ... close off to everything and everyone but your writing. That s the bloody price. I don t know maybe it's some kind of ultimate selfishness. Maybe it's part of the killer instinct. Unless you can stash away and bury thoughts of your greatest love you cannot sustain the kind of concentration that breaks most men trying to write a book over a three or four year period. — Leon Uris

I don't go off and sit down and try to write material, because then it's contrived and forced. I just live my life, and I see things in a word or a situation or a concept, and it will create a joke for me. — Steven Wright

Sarah Palin and her virtual burqa have me and my friends retching into our handbags. She's such a power-mad, backwater beauty-pageant casualty, it's easy to write her off and make fun of her. But in reality I feel as horrified as a ghetto Jew watching the rise of National Socialism. — Cintra Wilson

Every time I write something down I check it to see if it has that telltale glow, the glow that tells me there's something there. If it glows, it stays. Everything is either on or off. — Jim Woodring

Timothy Pychyl, a psychologist at Carleton University, told me. "But when people say things like 'I sometimes write down easy items I can cross off right away, because it makes me feel good,' that's exactly the wrong way to create a to-do list. That signals you're using it for mood repair, rather than to become productive." The — Charles Duhigg

I left my job as a feature writer on a newspaper to write a book, then sent it off to a number of agents thinking they would all reject me. Within a week, most had come back to say they loved what they had read, which then led to a bidding war for my first two novels. — Jane Green

He's not my lover," Isolfr said.
She raised an eyebrow, a long feathery, shaggy sweep. "You're his beloved. Both of them. I saw enough on the war-trail to know." Then she laughed, and took her hand off his and pushed his chest like a wolf-cub nudging playfully. "We don't get to pick who loves us, you know. And better to get him to write the song than be remembered forever as 'fair Isolfr, the cold.'"
He scrubbed a hand across his face, roughness of beard and scars and the smooth skin of the unmarked cheek. "Is that really what they call me?"
She smiled. "You frighten them, Viradechtisbrother. You went down under the mountain and came out again, twice, and the alfar call you friend. They'll have you among the heroes before you know it. And you can seem quite untouchable - 'ice-eyes, and ice-heart, and ice-hard, his will.'"
"Othinn help me. It is a song already. — Sarah Monette

L.A. ispolluted. It's overpopulated. But it is very much home. It was inevitable for me, the moving back. I was living in San Francisco, and Joan broke it off with me, and I needed a place to live. I'd been divorced. And I needed to write movies and TV shows to earn a living. Alimony. All that. So I figured what the hell, I'll go back to L.A. — James Ellroy

I write in the morning from about eight till noon, and sometimes again a bit in the afternoon. In the morning I start off by going over what I had done the previous day, which my wife has happily typed up for me. — Gene Hackman

I really write emotionally so whatever mood I'm in, or if a chord hits me a certain way that's what I'll go off of. — Zac Farro

Take your hands off her, Sinclair told the guy behind me, Or they'll write books about what I'll do to you. — MaryJanice Davidson

With every line I write I kill off the "artist" in me. With every line it is either murder in the first degree or suicide. I do not want to give hope to others, nor to inspire others. If we knew what it meant to be inspired we would not inspire. We would simply be. — Henry Miller

Film, for me, is in two stages. One is when I write the script more or less on my own - that's the nice bit. And then comes for me the unpleasant bit when they all go off, 100 people - actors and camera people and film and sound - and I stay away. When they go into the editing room, I come in again, and that's the bit I like. — Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

When I got off the plane, after eleven hours of travel and forty years away, the man took my passport and asked me the purpose of my visit, I wrote in my daybook, "To mourn," and then, "To mourn try to live," he gave me a look and asked if I would consider that business or pleasure, I wrote, "Neither." "For how long do you plan to mourn and try to live?" "For as long as I can." "Are we talking about a weekend or a year?" I didn't write anything. The man said, "Next. — Jonathan Safran Foer

When I went to the analyst for a kind of preliminary meeting, he said, 'I'll be able to fix you so that you'll write much more music than you do now.' I said, 'Good heavens! I already write too much, it seems to me.' That promise of his put me off. — John Cage

I think young people are the most creative and the coolest - people that we should be learning from. Even when I'm at a party, I'm analyzing it and thinking about it in the context of how I would write about it. That side of me never switches off. — Lorde

When I sat down to write I just felt like a geek writing about myself. And then it dawned on me, just because of the way I am, I can't stop talking, and part of the problem is that anything that gets said reminds me of something that happened to me one time, and invariably I cut people off and talk about myself. — Paula Poundstone

The Price of a Muse

I write for
resurrection

to see bodies reassemble
and rise

I've tried to write my dog
off of the pavement

my first girlfriend back
into my arms

a love into more everlasting
than it was

my own soul
into being.

I know now the price
of a muse.

My writing
has not saved me.

It won't
save you.

But let me try
to raise us up. — Nancy Boutilier

I am bound to accord you, in the name of free speech, the full right to shout, lie and write to your heart's content. But you are bound to grant me, in the name of freedom of association, the right to enter into, or withdraw from, association with people advocating this or that view. — Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

This dead man is bound up with my life, therefore I must do everything, promise everything in order to save myself; I swear blindly that I mean to live only for his sake and his family, with wet lips I try to placate him--and deep down in me lies the hope that I may buy myself off in this way and perhaps even get out of this; it is a little stratagem: if only I am allowed to escape, then I will see to it. So I open the book and read slowly:--Gerard Duval, compositor.

With the dead man's pencil write the address on an envelope, then swiftly thrust everything back into his tunic.

I have killed the printer, Gerard Duval. I must be a printer, I think confusedly, be a printer, printer... — Erich Maria Remarque

Sweet Goddess! she thought suddenly. I have never even spoken to him. I know nothing about the man, nothing at all.
What if he tries to get me into some sordid little room and force himself on me, like an animal? How will I fight him off? All alone, not able to cry for help?
No, it will not be like that, it could not be. I would have known if he were that kind of man, and felt repelled. He could not sing and write such beautiful verses, and look so fine if he were not the man I want him to be. Yes, when we meet, it will be as it is in his songs. He will obey, do exactly what I tell him and no more. Oh, I have hoped so long for this. Goddess of Love, let it be beautiful. — Robert Shea

The Top Ten Reasons Why Virgin Val Sucks
10. She called me a one-hit-wonder.
9. She doesn't appreciate the endearing nickname I gave her.
8. She makes me write stupid blogs about her at four in the morning.
7. She's encouraging people not to have sex.
6. She blew me off when I asked her out.
5. She has a crush on a douche bag.
4. She won't answer any of my calls.
3. She's such a tease with her look-but-don't-touch policy.
2. I played a whole effing concert just for her and she didn't come even though she told me she would. (You're such a liar!)
And the #1 reason why Virgin Val sucks?
I still want her anyway. — Kelly Oram

A lot of people who read my novel 'Smog City' ask me why I never killed off either of the two main characters. To be honest, it's because I've given them life. Not literally of course, but since I spent so much time developing and creating my characters, they've ended up with complex personalities, in fact they're almost sentient in a way, and to write them off as dead would be like killing a close friend to me. — Rebecca McNutt

There is a part of me that wants to write, a part that wants to theorize, a part that wants to sculpt, a part that wants to teach ... To force myself into a single role, to decide to be just on thing in life, would kill off large parts of me. — Hugh Prather

Outlining is like putting on training wheels. It gives me the courage to write, but we always go off the outline. — Hallie Ephron

When I write, I tend to be quite cut off from the world. At that point of time, I'm not thinking about editors, publishers or readers. I write the story the way it comes to me. — Amish Tripathi

We may know that the work we continue to put off doing will be bad. Worse, however, is the work we never do. A work that's finished is at least finished. It may be poor, but it exists, like the miserable plant in the lone flowerpot of my neighbour who's crippled. That plant is her happiness, and sometimes it's even mine. What I write, bad as it is, may provide some hurt or sad soul a few moments of distraction from something worse. That's enough for me, or it isn't enough, but it serves some purpose, and so it is with all of life. — Fernando Pessoa

Please write and tell me about London, I live for the day when I step off the boat-train and feel its dirty sidewalks under my feet. I want to walk up Berkeley Square and down Wimpole Street and stand in St.Paul's where John Donne preached and sit on the step Elizabeth sat on when she refused to enter the Tower, and like that. A newspaper man I know, who was stationed in London during the war, says tourists go to England with preconceived notions, so they always find exactly what they go looking for. I told him I'd go looking for the England of English literature, and he said:
Then it's there. — Helene Hanff

I don't want to think that anything is off limits for me to write about, but I also don't want to intrude on anybody's life, which is why there's very little specificity or names in the songs I write. — J. D. Souther

Perhaps within me the desire to put off that which I most in the world desire of late keeps watch, I mean, to write a book but a wounded book, a contentious, broken book, a book not pleased to be a book, to be only a book, to be born in the absence of my friend, a book incapable of acting as if the last times were not upon us, but which at the same time cannot act as if it were only a book hence a being unaware of the end, unaware what time it is. — Helene Cixous

One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I'm going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I'll have lost nothing - writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off. — Lawrence Block

Doug Crowley was going to go the way of all flesh, and as quickly as possible I would find him and flense him and send him off to the ocean's floor in four neat and separate garbage bags, and I would do it before he could write another taunting drivel-filled blog bragging about his insult to me. I would tape him and teach him what it truly meant to be Me, and I would make him wish he had chosen someone else to fill out his shadow, and the only question at all was a very simple one-word query: How? — Jeff Lindsay

The night was vibrating with new potential, the beautiful after-haze of adrenaline and bad ideas fully embraced. Ugly thoughts crept in, forcing me to write off a growing list of concerning data: My old dealer gone mad and roaming the sewers; Egbert's hand - notably short on its middle and ring fingers - reaching out to me with three tiny pill baggies; gas-masked kids dodging conscious thought like a plague; a trafficked tranny more concerned with evading cops than finding love. — Jeremy Robert Johnson

I used to write in a local coffee shop, but there was another guy, another writer, who kept sitting in my favorite seat. I would show up, and he would be there, and I would get exiled to a couch or something, and it would throw me off my game. — Lev Grossman

I'm one of those writers who started off writing novels and came to writing short stories later, partly because I didn't have the right ideas, partly because I think that short stories are more difficult. I think learning to write short stories also made me attracted toward a paring down of the novel form. — Julian Barnes

I have no sense of a model or predecessor when I write a memoir: For me, the form exists as a method of processing material that retains too many connections to life to be approached strictly and aesthetically. A memoir is a risk, a one-off, a bastard child. — Rachel Cusk

I want to go on living even after my death! And therefore I am grateful to God for this gift, this possibility of developing myself and of writing, of expressing all that is in me. I can shake off everything if I write; my sorrows disappear; my courage is reborn. But, and that is the great question, will I ever be able to write anything great, will I ever become a journalist or a writer? — Anne Frank

The scientist in me worries that my happiness is nothing more than a symptom of bipolar disease, hypergraphia from a postpartum disorder. The rest of me thinks that artificially splitting off the scientist in me from the writer in me is actually a kind of cultural bipolar disorder, one that too many of us have. The scientist asks how I can call my writing vocation and not addiction. I no longer see why I should have to make that distinction. I am addicted to breathing in the same way. I write because when I don't, it is suffocating. I write because something much larger than myself comes into me that suffuses the page, the world, with meaning. Although I constantly fear that what I am writing teeters at the edge of being false, this force that drives me cannot be anything but real, or nothing will ever be real for me again. — Alice Weaver Flaherty

Every time I sit down to write, I need to commit to a word count goal, otherwise I waste too much time editing and re-editing my previous work, staring dreamily off into space, pretending that I'm thinking profound, poetic thoughts when really I'm just thinking, 'Look at me being a writer! I'm so happy I'm a writer!' — Liane Moriarty

John (Grisham) was really helpful keeping me on track, not wandering off into subplots, making sure I didn't spill the beans too early, all kinds of nitty-gritty things that you've gotta have under control if you're going to write a good thriller. — Tony Vanderwarker

Sometimes, particularly in summers in New York, I have tried to write in shorts or with no shirt on and found myself unable to do so, the reason being, I take it, that writing, even of the most impersonal sort, is for me a divestment, a striptease, even, so that if I start off undressed, I have nowhere to go. — Alan Bennett

No such thing as destiny. But Fluff had come after me, not her
and it had brought the two of them together anyway. It was impossible to write it off as a series of accidents. Both ideas impossible to believe and impossible to dismiss. Which is what he's told me Christ knows how many times before, about the signs, the connections, the correspondence between things, the goddamned beguilement. You have to both believe it and know it can't be true, he'd said. You have to learn how to be the wry servant of two masters. I'd been so annoyed, I'd said: Yeah. I've never know what the fuck 'wry' actually means. — Glen Duncan

When we parted, she held on to me tight and said, I love you, Logan. Don't let's lose touch.' I couldn't stop the tears and neither could she, so she lit a cigarette and I said it looked like rain wasn't far off, and somehow we managed to part.
As I write this I feel that draining, hollowing helplessness that genuine love for another produces in you. It's at these moments that we know that we are going to die. Only with Freya, Stella and Gail. Only three. Better than none. — William Boyd

All good writers inspire me as I have never thought I was any good. As far as a writer who made me think I could do it, it was Henry Miller. Not because I thought he was so simple that I reckoned I could pull it off as well, but it was his freedom and guts that really moved me to want to write all the time. — Henry Rollins

I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, though not of that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull. He got a good estate by merchandise, and leaving off his trade, lived afterwards at York, from whence he had married my mother, whose relations were named Robinson, a very good family in that country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but, by the usual corruption of words in England, we are now called - nay we call ourselves and write our name - Crusoe; and so my companions always called me. — Daniel Defoe

There are two magic acts I want to pull off when I write. One is creating a feeling that when you're inside a book, you believe everything you're reading even when you know it's not true. And the second is an extension of that, which is you know it's not true, you know it's not real, but you believe it anyway. And it's that believing of the story that isn't real that attracted me to writing and storytelling in general. — Markus Zusak

One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first line reads, "As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect ... " When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn't know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Perhaps you would be so kind as to tell these details to the driver. As I believe I told you before, I am a busy man."
"I'd like to keep communications to one channel. It makes it clear where the responsibility lies."
"Responsibility?"
"In other words, say the cat dies while I'm gone, you'd get nothing out of me, even if I did find the sheep."
"Hmm," said the man. "Fair enough. You are somewhat off base, but you do quite well for an amateur. I shall write this down, so please speak slowly. — Haruki Murakami

They are all very serious people with stern expressions on their faces. They discuss nothing but important matters and like to philosophize a great deal, while at the same time everyone can see that the workers are detestably fed, sleep without suitable bedding, thirty to forty in a room with bedbugs everywhere, the stench, the dampness, and the moral corruption ... Obviously all our fine talk has gone on simply to hoodwink ourselves and other people as well. Show me the day nurseries that they're talking about so much about. And where are the libraries? Why, they just write about nurseries and libraries in novels, while in fact not a single one even exists. What does exist is nothing but dirt, vulgarity, and a barbarian way of life ... I dislike these terribly serious faces, they frighten me, and I'm afraid of serious conversations, too. We'd be better off if we all would just shut up for a while! — Anton Chekhov

Bastards have pissed me off," Reed snarled, out of breath, as he backed into the open armory door. "They hit me in the face."
Lang grabbed Reed's jaw, turned his face toward him. "It's just a scratch."
It's just my fucking face," Reed sputtered. "It needs to look good on a book jacket when I write my memoirs someday. — Cindy Gerard

Every Greek, man, woman, and child, has to two Greeks inside. We even have technical terms for them. They are a part of us, as inevitable as the fact that we all write poetry and the fact that every single one of us thinks that he knows everything that there is to know. We are all hospitable to strangers, we all are nostalgic for something, our mothers all treat their grown sons like babies, our sons all treat their mothers a sacred and beat their wives, we all hate solitude, we all try to find out from a stranger whether or not we are related, we all use every long word we know as often as we possibly can, we all go out for a walk in the evening so that we can look over each others' fences, we all think that we are equal to the best. Do you understand?"
The captain was perplexed, "You didn't tell me about the two Greeks inside every Greek."
"I didn't? Well, I must have wandered off the point. — Louis De Bernieres

Even though novels were the love of my life, I started off writing poetry. I think because I had a knack for image and lyricism, even though I didn't really have anything to write about, or I didn't know what to write about. I could just couple words together that pleased me and so poetry seemed sort of natural. — Melissa Febos

Nadya Zelenin and her mother had returned from a performance of Eugene Onegin at the theatre. Going into her room, the girl swiftly threw off her dress and let her hair down. Then she quickly sat at the table in her petticoat and white bodice to write a letter like Tatyana's.
'I love you,' she wrote, 'but you don't love me, you don't love me!'
Having written this, she laughed.
She was only sixteen and had never loved anyone yet. She knew that Gorny (an army officer) and Gruzdyov (a student) were both in love with her, but now, after the opera, she wanted to doubt their love. To be unloved and miserable: what an attractive idea! There was something beautiful, touching and romantic about A loving B when B wasn't interested in A. Onegin was attractive in not loving at all, while Tatyana was enchanting because she loved greatly. Had they loved equally and been happy they might have seemed boring.
("After The Theatre") — Anton Chekhov

I'm not a standup. I didn't start off as a writer, I learned to write through improvisation, and so that's the part of the show that can most surprise me. The written part of the show, I know I can get wrong. You can't really get the interview "wrong." — Stephen Colbert

My own habit had always been to write about the things that ticked me off in a given day. If I kept a journal at all, I kept it to vent. — Ariel Gore

Go and catch a falling star, Get with child a mandrake root, Tell me where all past years are, Or who cleft the Devil's foot. Teach me to hear the mermaids singing, Or to keep off envy's stinging, And find What wind Serves to advance an honest mind. Decide what this is about Write a second verse yourself — Diana Wynne Jones

I require silence to write the way an apple tree requires winter to make fruit. Being with people is intimate and joyous, but at some point, I'll wander off by myself. The paradox is that what began in childhood as an act of necessary solitude has led me straight to a life with others, in which I fly to China or Lithuania or northern Minnesota to read my poems and talk with other people who love language made into a lathe on which a life can be tuned and be turned. — Jane Hirshfield

The best I can say is that it's better for me to write about despair and darkness than to be incapable of getting off the sofa. It's better to write about suicide than to contemplate it too heavily. — Paul Westerberg

Why do I write today? The beauty of the terrible faces of our nonentities stirs me to it: colored women day workers- old and experienced- returning home at dusk, in cast off clothing faces like old Florentine oak. — William Carlos Williams

After 'Memory Keeper's Daughter,' it took me a few months to shut out the world. I really had to turn off the Internet and sort of cloister myself away from the world again and sink into that psychic space to write again. — Kim Edwards

If you want to write a fantasy story with Norse gods, sentient robots, and telepathic dinosaurs, you can do just that. Want to throw in a vampire and a lesbian unicorn while you're at it? Go ahead. Nothing's off limits. But the endless possibility of the genre is a trap. It's easy to get distracted by the glittering props available to you and forget what you're supposed to be doing: telling a good story. Don't get me wrong, magic is cool. But a nervous mother singing to her child at night while something moves quietly through the dark outside her house? That's a story. Handled properly, it's more dramatic than any apocalypse or goblin army could ever be. — Patrick Rothfuss

Until today, it really pissed me off that I'd become this totally centered Zen Master and nobody had noticed. Still, I'm doing the little FAX thing. I write little HAIKU things and FAX them around to everyone. When I pass people in the hall at work, I get totally ZEN right in everyone's hostile little FACE. — Chuck Palahniuk

The Bible is clear about two principles: (1) We always need to forgive, but (2) we don't always achieve reconciliation. Forgiveness is something that we do in our hearts; we release someone from a debt that they owe us. We write off the person's debt, and she no longer owes us. We no longer condemn her. She is clean. Only one party is needed for forgiveness: me. The person who owes me a debt does not have to ask my forgiveness. It is a work of grace in my heart. — Henry Cloud

If there was one fact that sent me hurtling off to write 'Politics Lost,' it was when I learned that John Kerry had focus-grouped Abu Ghraib. We knew about the Justice Department memo in June of 2004, and Kerry didn't raise that in any one of his three debates with George Bush. — Joe Klein

Hey, we live each day, start each day, as if we had an endless number stretching out ahead of us. We don't, but that's how one has to face the day, right? I see an analogy with writing fiction: the story at hand probably won't come off well, and even if it does, it probably won't get published, but if it does there won't be any payment for it - and even if there is, almost nobody will read it, and most who do won't understand or like it. But you go ahead and write the story. What choices do you have? There's always silence, but that won't do for me." - Gordon Weaver (who is suddenly my hero, even though I don't know who he is). — Gordon Weaver

Rich kids who write songs about food stamps always piss me off. I'm not going to write any songs about that, either. — Neko Case

I'm from a little island off of Massachusetts, Nantucket. It's hard getting into the music business from there, but my parents took me to songwriting festivals because I would write and produce my own music. — Meghan Trainor

One of the things that put me off writing for a while was that piece of advice everybody gives new writers: 'Write what you know.' Nobody would ever want to read about my boring life! But I do know a lot of things about different societies' cultures and mythologies. The way people were and are. — Carol Berg

I laughed it off but I close the bedroom door and I lose it and I stick it all down here and this is where it all stays.
And this is where it has to stay because I am not ending up in the nutter ward again with brown walls, jigsaws, and people crying that their husbands left them, and men slamming their heads against walls, and Mum bringing me a mini trifle and a copy of Smash Hits like that would make everything better.
It didn't. It won't. It can't. Psychiatric wards when most of my mates were ... .I can't tell anyone what is going on ... Can't write ... Can't think about it.
Not even here. — Rae Earl

Susan Griffin describes it as a time when "there is no intrinsic authority to my words." "I ... clean off my desk. I make telephone calls. I know I am avoiding the typewriter. I know that in my mind, where there might be words, there is simply a blankness. I may try to write and then my words bore me." But when the time is right, the waiting will have been worth it. "Because each time I write, each time the authentic words break through, I am changed. The older order that I was collapses and dies. I lose control. I do not know exactly what words will appear on the page. I follow language. I follow the sound of the words, and I am surprised and transformed by what I record." Excerpt from "Thoughts on Writing: A Diary," in The Writer on her Work. — Judith Barrington

What have I ever had to do in my life that really
needed to be done? I always had a choice, and I always took the easy way
out - we always took the easy way out. At our age the burden of double
maths on a Monday morning and finding a spot the size of Pluto on my nose
was as complicated as it ever got for me.
This time round I'm having a baby. A baby. And that baby will be
around on the Monday, on the Tuesday, on the Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I have no weekends off. No three-month holidays.
I can't take a day off, call in sick, or get Mum to write a note. I am
going to be the mum now. I wish I could write myself a note.
I'm scared, Alex.
Rosie — Cecelia Ahern

Well, I would hardly say I do write as yet. But I write because I like words. I suppose if I liked stone I might carve. I like words. I like reading. I notice particular words. That sets me off. — A.S. Byatt

Somebody described it to me the best as when you go in to write a song with two people that you've never met, you're pretty much going in and taking off your pants in front of strangers, so it's a really weird feeling. — Scotty McCreery

So, you know what? I'm not ready to write Gen Y off just yet and neither should you, because I think we're going to grow up just fine. Yeah, it pains me to admit it, but the kids are all right. — Sarra Manning

The funny thing is that the process of coming up with an idea for a column or a 'Candid Camera' sequence is essentially the same thing. I just live my life with eyes and ears perhaps a little bit wider open than some people. Whatever bothers me or seems off kilter or in need of parody-or on a serious subject, in need of examination-in the past I had done a sequence about it. Now I write a column about it. — Peter Funt

As a songwriter, you're never off - for me, anyway. There's a certain mentality of people that decide, "Oh, we're going to try to write songs from this time of the day to this time of the day." Almost treat it like a real job. I can't do that. I've never been able to write songs like that. You never know when something creative is going to hit you, or emotion or whatever. You can take it, and turn it into something that makes somebody feel something. I love that about my job. — Kenny Chesney

I write love poems when I'm not rapping. It comes naturally." He winked at me.
"If you start rapping, I promise you I'll throw myself off this platform. — Kristen Day

It started off for me as just wanting to be an actor and sort of resenting in a weird way being expected to write as well as be a comedian and an improviser. And then you think about it for a minute, and I smartened up and realized that the only way to sustain a career is to generate your own material. Or to be in control of your career as best you can. And in allowing yourself to do that it opens up a whole new world of possibilities. And then you're like "Oh, producing is a thing." — Rob Corddry

And for so long, I had thought if I was going to write a song, or get "into" something, I had to at least smoke a joint or something. And that didn't work anymore. Once I was fairly well cleaned out, even a little bit of a drug getting into my work threw me off kilter. — Iggy Pop

When I drive, I check out everything I see, and just taking in all those observations helps me think. So I draw and write a lot as I drive, and I know that's dangerous, but I manage to do it off to the side, with my notes on the seat. — Edward Ruscha

Hattie handed me a fresh cup of coffee. "Off you go now. Write a masterpiece that will save the world," she cackled nudging me out of the kitchen. — Kaylie Hunter

But her beauty and stillness broke the balance in me. In my small apartment, she kissed me, and the ground opened up, swallowed me, buried me right there in that moment. How many awful poems did I write thinking of her? I know now what she was to me - the first glimpse of a space-bridge, a wormhole, a galactic portal off this bound and blind planet. She had seen other worlds, and she held the lineage of other worlds, spectacularly, in the vessel of her black body. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

As long as I'm between home and the clinic I do all right. But out in the real world, I feel like prey. I slink around and can feel people looking at me. I feel their eyes boring into me. I feel what they're thinking: Watch her, she could go off anytime. But within the walls of my farmhouse, I climb out of the protective shell, my arms slowly rise like a phoenix, and I dance, wail, fly around the room and then collapse, crying, in front of my mirrors. I start to see in the mirror what it is I really look like, instead of what I was trained from the womb to see. I do not write about it. I do not talk about it. I do not know what I am doing. But just like a baby bird, I am blinking once-sealed eyes and unfolding damp wings. I cannot articulate the past. A part of me knows it's there, lurking, just behind what I can acknowledge, but it is not within sight. And I am keeping it that way. — Julie Gregory

Being tall when I was youngerl I was always a bit awkward. As a teenager, I was very, very thin, so I was very gangly and limby, and would sweep things off the table without realising how big my wingspan was - just out of control. A lot of women write to me and say, 'I'm six foot and exactly the same happens' - that's been lovely therapy. — Miranda Hart

If you cut off my hands, I'll write with my feet, and if you cut off my feet, I'll write with my nose, and if you cut that off, you may as well cut my whole head off, because no matter how you slice and dice me, you can't control what I think, or what I feel. You can keep me locked up for the rest of my life, however brief that may be. But you will never, ever own me. — Rachel Vincent

Make me an offer, " I said at last. "Write it up, and give me a point-by-point outline of why you're a good would-be suitor. "
He started to laugh, then saw my face. "Seriously? That's like homework. There's a reason I'm not in college. " I snapped my fingers. "Get to it, Ivashkov. I want to see you put in a good day's work. "
I expected a joke or a brush-off until later, but instead, he said, "Okay. "
"Okay?"
"Yep. I'm going to go back to my room right now to start drafting my assignment. "
I stared incredulously as he reached for his coat. I had never seen Adrian move that fast when any kind of labor was involved. Oh no. What had I gotten myself into? — Richelle Mead

The skating community is very fickle. And with me, they're especially fickle for whatever reason. Maybe I bring it on myself, but if you don't prove yourself and you don't skate consistently, then they can very easily write you off and bring somebody from behind you and put them in your place. — Johnny Weir

Sydney: Can I ask you a question? Me: As long as you promise never again to start a question off with whether or not you can propose a question. Sydney: Okay, asshole. I know I shouldn't be thinking about him at all, but I'm curious. What did he wrote on that paper when we went to get my purse? And what did you write back that made hit you? Me: I agree that you shouldn't be thinking about him at all, but I'm honestly shocked it's taken you this long to ask me about it. Sydney: Well? Ugh. I hate writing it verbatim, but she wants to know, so ... Me: He wrote "Are you fucking her?" Sydney: OMG! What a prick! Me: Yep. Sydney: So what did you say back to him that made him punch you? Me: I write, "Why do you think I'm here for her purse? I gave her a hundred for tonight, and now she owes me change." I reread the text, and I'm not so sure it sounds as funny as I thought it did. — Colleen Hoover

You know what? No. I don't give a damn about the lies. Lies are fine. Truth. Lies. One way or the other, at least - " She broke off again, shaking her head. "It's not the lies. It's the silence. Silence is what gets me. All the things you don't say. All the words you don't write. That gets to you. After a while it just kills you. All the stories you teach yourself not to tell. All the truth and lies that you never ever print because all of it is too dangerous. — Paolo Bacigalupi

For myself, I haven't been content to carry on producing books that merely strain against the conventions - as I've grown older, and realised that there aren't that many books left for me to write, so I've become determined that they should be the fictive equivalent of ripping the damn corset off altogether and chucking it on the fire. — Will Self

If you told me to write a love song tonight, I'd have a lot of trouble. But if you tell me to write a love song about a girl with a red dress who goes into a bar and is on her fifth martini and is falling off her chair, that's a lot easier, and it makes me free to say anything I want. — Stephen Sondheim

I was very against pink and purple when I was young, because they were girls' colors. But that was only because I didn't want people to write me off for what I can do. When I got into my 20s, I decided that was stupid. — Danica Patrick

It's more like you write what comes to you ... You try to reflect the mood of the songs. Take 'Rearviewmirror', we start off with the music and it kinds of propels the lyrics. It made me feel like I was in a car, leaving something, a bad situation. There's an emotion there. I remembered all the times I wanted to leave ... — Eddie Vedder