Writing Quotes
-
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
-
A song has to take on character, shape, body and influence people to an extent that they use it for their own devices. It must affect them not just as a song, but as a lifestyle. The rock stars have assimilated all kinds of philosophies, styles, histories, writings, and they throw out what they have gleaned from that.
David Bowie
-
I've been working on my own music. I've been writing an album, stuff that's kind of personal to my own life.
Ariel Winter
-
I called the doctor, during writing the book, the psychiatrist who treated me at that time, Dr. Jackson. And I said, Dr. Jackson, whole pieces are missing. I don't understand what happened to me.
Jim Bakker
-
Here's the truth about telling stories with your life. It's going to sound like a great idea, and you're going to get excited about it, and then when it comes time to do the work, you're not going to want to do it. It's like that with writing books, and it's like that with life. People love to have lived a great story, but few people like the work it takes to make it happen. But joy costs pain.
Donald Miller
-
I'd studied 16th century science and magic. I thought it was strange that people were interested in the same kinds of things my research was about. The more I thought about it, the more intriguing it became and pretty soon I was writing a novel about a reluctant witch and a 1500-year-old vampire.
Deborah Harkness
-
I'm really just trying... to write what feels true to me. I don't think about a lofty responsibility. I think I'd be paralyzed by that. Like any of my male colleagues, I'm writing the stories that interest me in a way that feels true to me.
Kelly Sue DeConnick
-
I sat down with a yellow legal pad and began writing 'A Time to Kill.' Had no idea what I was doing. It became, over a period of several years, a secret little hobby nobody knew about except my wife, because she was reading chapter by chapter.
John Grisham
-
There are many rules of good writing, but the best way to find them is to be a good reader.
Stephen Ambrose
-
It's so difficult writing about living people.
James D. Watson
-
My goal would be to find a big, fat subject that would occupy me to the end of my life, and when I finish it, I'll die. What's agony is starting; I hate starting them. I just want to keep writing now and end when it ends.
Philip Roth
-
Over the years, I have been a house painter, farm worker, paste-up artist, Easter Bunny, pizza delivery person, homeless shelter staff member, and counselor for adults and kids with mental illness - I quit my last real job in 2000 to work on writing full-time.
Jennifer McMahon
-
You don’t think when you play music, you just try to play and be in it. It is the same for me when the writing is going really well. It’s the same kind of feeling. I’m just in it. It’s not the words, it’s not the sentences, I’m not aware of it. Then it’s good.
Karl Ove Knausgard
-
You have to determine what you are and send the messages out to people, like, 'Hey, I'm a screenwriter - look at this.' You can't sit around, wondering why people aren't calling and asking about my writing.
Zach Galligan
-
I have been taking stock of my 50 years since I left Wichita. How I have existed fills me with horror for I failed in everything. Spelling, arithmetic, writing, swimming, tennis, golf, dancing, singing, acting, wife, mistress, whore, friend, even cooking. And I do not excuse myself with the usual escape of not trying. I tried with all my heart.
Louise Brooks
-
I never deny poems when they come; whatever I am doing, whatever I am writing, I lay it aside and attend to the arriving poem.
Amy Lowell