Quotes & Sayings About Writing

I should have been conceived during Woodstock; it's in my blood: that burning desire to turn an absolute on its head and see what's underneath. I'm as random as I can be and as responsible as I should be. Attempting to fuse the two makes for interesting days. — Chila Woychik

I talk to myself on paper about my characters - sometimes writing in first person ... I keep lists of unanswered questions that I can always turn to in order to get myself going. — Phyllis A. Whitney

There are two kinds of people in boxing. Those who say, 'Oh, boy; Tom Hauser is writing an article about me,' and those who say, 'Big problem; Tom Hauser is writing an article about me.' — Jim Lampley

You fail only if you stop writing. — Ray Bradbury

If, while observing the boundless universe, the writer is able to scrutinise his own self as well as others, the resulting incisiveness of his observations will far surpass objective descriptions of reality. — Gao Xingjian

Any time I write a new song, I am jazzed about it for like 24 hours and then I am over it and want to write another one. — Hunter Hayes

Bad writing is not easier than good writing. It's just as hard to make a toilet seat as it is a castle window. Only the view is different. — Ben Hecht

Writing is the only thing I've ever done with persistence, except for being married. — Richard Ford

Writing of only one small part of the broader problem, namely the single-minded pursuit of individualistic 'rights,' [Don] Feder is not wrong to conclude:

Absent a delicate balance--rights and duties, freedom and order--the social fabric begins to unravel. The rights explosion of the past three decades has taken us on a rapid descent to a culture without civility, decency, or even that degree of discipline necessary to maintain an advanced industrial civilization. Our cities are cesspools, our urban schools terrorist training camps, our legislatures brothels where rights are sold to the highest electoral bidder. — D. A. Carson

Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy. In the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea. That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife. — Audre Lorde

The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can. — Julian Barnes

Writing is like running a marathon. One needs stamina and perseverance. The right preparation and pacing get results. — K.J. Kilton

I am writing to apply for the position of bookkeeper. Attached, you will find my list of qualifications. I have been keeping books for four years now, and I am never going to give them back. — Joey Comeau

It's time to write dangerous music. It's time to take risks. It's time to wear your heart on your sleeve, and sing about the things that actually matter to you. It's time to bury the shackles of religious expectation and stop trying to put new clothes on the dead. — John Mark McMillan

His importance to the century just past, and therefore his status as a figure in history as well as in literature, derives from the extraordinary salience of the subjects he 'took on,' and stayed with, and never abandoned. As a consequence, we commonly use the term 'Orwellian' in one of two ways. To describe a state of affairs as 'Orwellian' is to imply crushing tyranny and fear and conformism. To describe a piece of writing as 'Orwellian' is to recognize that human resistance to these terrors is unquenchable. Not bad for one short lifetime. — Christopher Hitchens

It can be hard to write a skillfully entertaining fiction, but a great book wants to be more, and wants more from us. — Guy Gavriel Kay

Jane Austen writes about these humdrum lives with such empathy that they seem endlessly fascinating — Mark Haddon

The outright propagandist sets up in me such a fury of opposition I am not apt to care much whether he has got his facts straight or not. He is like someone standing on your toes between you and an open window, describing the view to you. All I ask of him to do is to open the window, stand out of the way, and let me look at the view for myself. — Katherine Anne Porter

Oh, readers. If only you knew what we've gone through for you. — Harry Olsen

As always, the blessed relief of starting, a feeling that was like falling into a hole filled with bright light.
As always, the glum knowledge that he would not write as well as he wanted to write.
As always the terror of not being able to finish, of accelerating into a brick wall.
As always, the marvelous joyful nervy feeling of journey begun. — Stephen King

For me, having it all is being paid to write novels. — Candace Bushnell

When writing a thank-you if you've had lunch with someone downtown, send an e-mail. If somebody is giving you a dinner party in his or her home and all the work that takes, that person deserves a written thank-you. — Letitia Baldrige

Love is one of those topics that plenty of people try to write about but not enough try to do. — Criss Jami

To me, writing is remembering something funny that happened, or maybe something I said seven years ago. — Matthew Perry

A man is crazy who writes a secret in any other way than one which will conceal it from the vulgar. — Roger Bacon

I received a letter just before I left office from a man. I don't know why he chose to write it, but I'm glad he did. He wrote that you can go to live in France, but you can't become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Italy, but you can't become a German, an Italian. He went through Turkey, Greece, Japan and other countries. But he said anyone, from any corner of the world, can come to live in the United States and become an American. — Ronald Reagan

Keep writing. Keep doing it and doing it. Even in the moments when it's so hurtful to think about writing. — Heather Armstrong

People who think following your dreams is a fairytale don't realize they're living the biggest fairytale of all, following the sheep — Jason E. Hodges

Editing one's writing is as easy as lighting a match while riding a bicycle. — Fennel Hudson

It's great to write for actors when you know who they are. I think I prefer it. — Jason Gann

I tell myself that, regardless of what source I draw on, I'm writing a new work for reasons peculiar to me and not an adaptation, and so feel, in the end, justified in singing it my way. — Norman Lock

It has been demonstrated through years of workshops that the Artist Within tends to make the same mistakes as the artist within everybody else. — Howard Mittelmark

I've always thought of myself as a realist. I can remember fighting with my professors about it in grad school. The world that I live in consists of 250 advertisements a day and any number of unbelievably entertaining options, most of which are subsidized by corporations that want to sell me things. The whole way that the world acts on my nerve endings is bound up with stuff that the guys with the leather patches on their elbows would consider pop or trivial or ephemeral. I use a fair amount of pop stuff in my fiction, but what I mean by it is nothing different than what other people mean in writing about trees and parks and having to walk to the river to get water 100 years ago. It's just the texture of the world I live in. — David Foster Wallace

I will always treasure the privilege of writing the 'Sports of The Times' column. — George Vecsey

Writers love to write those idiotic, long stage directions, and some of them worse than others. They have nothing to do with the movie. They're just jerking around. — William H. Macy

I have a 10-year track record of writing for the Jewish community. — Anita Diament

In writing and speaking, three is more satisfying than any other number. — Carmine Gallo

I wrote and wrote and poured out my twenty one year old heart into those pages. — Preeti Shenoy

Every morning or afternoon, whenever you want to write, you have to go up and shoot that old bear under your desk between the eyes. — Robert Leckie

It helps to write down half a dozen things which are worrying me. Two of them, say, disappear; about two of them nothing can be done, so it's no use worrying; and two perhaps can be settled. — Winston Churchill

To justify an unorthodox life by writing about it is to re-inscribe the original violation, to re-violate masculine turf. — Nancy K. Miller

{Y}ou make do with what you're given, and I've spent a good many years learning to write fine-sounding sentences so that I can hide behind them. It's the way of the hermit crab, with nothing to recommend it but the pretty shell it annexes for its own. — Norman Lock

The thing I'm writing now, I have various characters, and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, this couple dies. And they have a daughter ... I thought, 'OK, we have to do something with the daughter' ... then I realized she's not really their daughter. She has her own story. And she's become the most interesting character. She was this throwaway character that I didn't even conceive of before I started writing her into it, and now she's become very important in this book. — Sandra Dallas

The learned fool writes his nonsense in better language than the unlearned, but it is still nonsense. — Benjamin Franklin

For example, when I was writing Leviathan, which was written both in New York and in Vermont - I think there were two summers in Vermont, in that house I wrote about in Winter Journal, that broken-down house ... I was working in an out-building, a kind of shack, a tumble-down, broken-down mess of a place, and I had a green table. I just thought, "Well, is there a way to bring my life into the fiction I'm writing, will it make a difference?" And the fact is, it doesn't make any difference. It was a kind of experiment which couldn't fail. — Paul Auster

The guiding metaphor of classic style is seeing the world. The writer can see something that the reader has not yet noticed, and he orients the reader's gaze so that she can see it for herself. The purpose of writing is presentation, and its motive is disinterested truth. It succeeds when it aligns language with the truth, the proof of success being clarity and simplicity. The truth can be known, and is not the same as the language that reveals it; prose is a window onto the world. The writer knows the truth before putting it into words; he is not using the occasion of writing to sort out what he thinks. Nor does the writer of classic prose have to argue for the truth; he just needs to present it. That is because the reader is competent and can recognize the truth when she sees it, as long as she is given an unobstructed view. The writer and the reader are equals, and the process of directing the reader's gaze takes the form of a conversation. — Steven Pinker

All novels must be autobiographical because I am the only material that I know. All of the characters are me. But at the same time, a novel is never autobiographical even if it describes the life of the author. Literary writing is a completely different medium. — John Banville

I have a thing - I call it magic - but I feel like I can write stuff down in the middle of the night and wake up and it happens. I write what I want in my journal. — Ester Dean

The Lampoon was definitely quite formative. You know there's a crazy like kind of network of comedy writers from The Lampoon that are, that kind of you know like Seinfeld and The Simpsons and a lot of shows kind of had a lot of kind of Lampoon writers and so that was very formative. I mean, to me I got interested in comedy writing at an early like reading like Dave Barry. — Nicholas Stoller

I love literature deeply. I view books as sacred things, and in writing my story, I'm going to do my best to honor the form that has played such a huge part in shaping who I am. — Flea

One of the questions I face when working on a book about a historical event is whether I should visit the actual place that I'm writing about. No matter how scrupulously maintained a historic house or battlefield may be, it is nothing like it was in the long-ago past. — Nathaniel Philbrick

My second album was written while I was on the road promoting the first record. I tried to take my personal experiences and elevate them to universal experiences, so that I wasn't writing songs about living on a tour bus or being on a TV set for the first time. — Kate Voegele

Good art can come out of thieves, bootleggers, or horse swipes. People really are afraid to find out just how much hardship and poverty they can stand. They are afraid to find out how tough they are. Nothing can destroy the good writer. The only thing that can alter the good writer is death. Good ones don't have time to bother with success or getting rich. Success is feminine and like a woman; if you cringe before her, she will override you. So the way to treat her is to show her the back of your hand. Then maybe she will do the crawling. — William Faulkner

India went through a dramatic revolution after the '90s when our economy started opening up for the first time and Indians were now experiencing the Western life, if you will. Drugs and sex and a lot of those influences came in as the economy stabilized, and we were growing up and experiencing that. The Indian writing market was very small at that time. Our literature was very attuned to what Western audiences were interested in, so everybody was writing about the slums in India and magic realism or stories about Hindus and Muslims and partition. — Karan Bajaj

When people give you a writing assignment, they're asking what you think. That's the very opposite of being an actor. When you're an actor, no one wants to hear what you think. — David Rakoff

Even if I'm writing music, it's with a lyric in mind, to communicate some kind of feeling. — Cass McCombs

I think a lot of people are very good, but I don't think anybody could do my rhythm. I was thinking, "If you want my rhythm" - and when I was writing, I was writing them for myself - "why am I watching another actor doing what I should be doing?" It was just a really unpleasant experience. — Jake M. Johnson

Speaking and writing English perfectly should not be a privilege. To those who try to politicize this matter, I tell them now, do not mess with the future of our children. — Luis Fortuno

People recover differently. Some change cities, some fall in love and some begin writing. — Kanza Javed

A cop told me, a long time ago, that there's no substitute for knowing what you're doing. Most of us scribblers do not. The ones that're any good are aware of this. The rest write silly stuff. The trouble is this: The readers know it. — George V. Higgins

I can't recommend technical writing as a day job for fiction writers because it's going to be hard to write all day and then come home and write fiction. — Ted Chiang

There's a certain magic about writing even when the characters refuse to act the way I want them to. — Gloria Bevan

I don't plan on writing biographies of great sports stars who are still playing ball. But I did write one on Jackie Robinson, who was playing ball in the 20th century. — David A. Adler

Read and write with a sensitive ear. The craft of writing is very important. Practice the craft. — Henry Petroski

The music defied classification. If I had been writing a
review of the show, I would have labeled it progressive,
guitar-driven rock 'n' roll. But the guitars made sounds guitars
didn't always make. Symphonic sounds. Sacred sounds.
The music dug in so deep you didn't hear it so much as feel
it, reminding me of a dream I used to have when I was a kid,
where I would be standing on a street corner, I would jump
into the air, flap my arms, and soar up into the sky.
That's the only way I could describe the music.
It was the sonic equivalent of flight. — Tiffanie DeBartolo

I think if the writing comes too easily, it shows - it's usually hard to read. — Tracy Kidder

There is a difference if we see something with a pencil in our hand or without one. — Paul Valery

I realize then that the disappearance of a culture does not signify the disappearance of human value, but simply of certain means of expressing this value, yet the fact remains that I have no sympathy for the current European civilization and do not understand its goals, if it has any. So I am really writing for friends who are scattered throughout the corners of the globe. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Writing mysteries lets me get away with murder. I think 'the mystery' may be the greatest form for social criticism, simply because it is pedestrian. — Gregory McDonald

Writing is an organized way of thinking. I don't know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write them. — Don DeLillo

If I'm at home on my own and the writing isn't going well, I clean my house. And there have been times in the past few years when my house has looked really clean. — Peter Mullan

My readers think that I write for the day because my writings are based on the day. So I shall have to wait until my writings are obsolete. Then they may acquire timeliness. — Karl Kraus

J. R. R. Tolkien, the near-universally-hailed father of modern epic fantasy, crafted his magnum opus The Lord of the Rings to explore the forces of creation as he saw them: God and country, race and class, journeying to war and returning home. I've heard it said that he was trying to create some kind of original British mythology using the structure of other cultures' myths, and maybe that was true. I don't know. What I see, when I read his work, is a man trying desperately to dream.
Dreaming is impossible without myths. If we don't have enough myths of our own, we'll latch onto those of others - even if those myths make us believe terrible or false things about ourselves. Tolkien understood this, I think because it's human nature. Call it the superego, call it common sense, call it pragmatism, call it learned helplessness, but the mind craves boundaries. Depending on the myths we believe in, those boundaries can be magnificently vast, or crushingly tight. — N.K. Jemisin

I wasn't sure what I'd done to deserve such a wonderful gift, and I wasn't sure if it was insolent, but I thanked God for fallen angels. — Jamie McGuire

Writing a list of your goals with a deadline is vastly important. For how does a captain know where to go without an outlined map? — Justin Perry

I have a group of cafes and coffee shops that I go to regularly. They usually have an area where I can plug in my computer and have a corner seat where I can do a couple hours of writing or whatever, even the noise of the surrounding people walking by. Those things are the things that stimulate me into writing. — Bong Joon-ho

'An Unquiet Mind' wasn't hard to write in terms of the actual writing of it. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Writing for publication is an odd hybrid of intimate self-exploration and public exhibitionsim. — Talia Vance

Charlie Rangel was writing laws on our taxes as chair of the Ways and Means Committee while somehow neglecting to pay his own. — Nancy Gibbs

In television writing, you want to hear what the characters say as opposed to giving them something to say. It's the same with the cartoons. — Bruce Eric Kaplan

I write in a hurry, because the little one, who has been sleeping a long time, begins to call for me. Poor thing! when I am sad, I lament that all my affections grow on me, till they become too strong for my peace, though they all afford me snatches of exquisite enjoyment. — Mary Wollstonecraft

When I'm actually writing by hand, I get more of a sense of the rhythm of sentences, of syntax. The switch to the computer is when I actually start thinking about lines. That's the workhorse part. At that point, I'm being more mathematical about putting the poem on the page and less intuitive about the rhythm of the syntax. — Natasha Trethewey

You should constantly write because your writing is always evolving and progressing. It's really important to start writing young. — Ellie Goulding

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

I began writing when I was still in the British Foreign Service, and it was then understood that even if you wrote about butterfly collecting, you used another name. — John Le Carre

I write because I'm a writer. It is rather like cooking: to make something out of the raw material at hand. — Sybille Bedford

One of the unfortunate things about creative writing courses is that they make people impatient. People feel that they have prepared themselves and that they must now do it. In fact there are positive incentives for doing so - universities are offering degrees for writing novels. — Robert Dessaix

I have no reason to sit home and write songs all day without going out and playing for the folks. And I have no reason to go play for the folks unless I'm writing new songs so they can sort of feed off one another. And I just try to do the best I can. — Guy Clark

There's a whole gamut of things to do with film music that don't apply when you're making a record or if you're writing a concert piece or something. — Henry Jackman

I do not need any writing, since I transmit teaching beyond words and ideas. — Bodhidharma

Starting a new chapter is much like composing the perfect photograph. You must ensure the proper components are there. You may throw out the extra, but with out the key elements the story goes untold. — Faith Tilley Johnson

I realized that I was writing about folks with lots of skills, especially fix-it skills and survival skills, who were nonetheless not doing well in the new-millennium America. — Bonnie Jo Campbell

I am, to my core, Canadian, so, by osmosis, everything I write reflects that upbringing. — Elinor Florence

Seven years into writing a novel, I started to lose my mind. My thirty-seventh birthday had just come and gone, the end of 2008 was approaching, and I was constantly aware of how little I had managed to accomplish. — Akhil Sharma

Hemingway, whenever he was stuck in his writing, would tell himself to write one true thing. A true sentence. Then, he would write another. And another. It — Kamal Ravikant

Wordy! I enjoy description - I like words, and words are the tools that writers use, just like paint is the tool that artists use. I think words are fun, and I have a lot of fun using them. I know that a lot of kids think my stories start very slowly, and I expect that's true. But that's the way I like to read stories, so when I'm writing them I can do what I want! I say that to kids in schools, and they are very generous - they say, That's true. You can do what you want. It's your story. — Natalie Babbitt

Music is an important part of my writing process. — Peter James

Reading," he says, "is always this: there is a thing that is there, a thing made of writing, a solid, material object, which cannot be changed, and through this thing we measure ourselves against something else that is not present, something else that belongs to the immaterial, invisible world, because it can only be thought, imagined, or because it was once and is no longer, past, lost, unattainable, in the land of the dead. . . . — Italo Calvino

I love writing for and about women. In my whole career I have. — Mitch Glazer

My son is the reason why I write music. He's the reason why everything is different for me. Because when he came into the picture, my priorities changed. I can risk possibly being incarcerated because the only person pays for it is me. I know that if I'm not physically available to take care of him, nobody else will. I want to have the relationship with him that me and my father never had. — Curtis Jackson