Writing Quotes
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A lot of writing I do on tour. I do a lot on airplanes. At home, I write a lot, obviously. When I write a song, what I usually do is work the lyric out first from some basic idea that I had, and then I get an acoustic guitar and I sit by the tape recorder and I try to bang it out as it comes.
Pete Townshend
The Who
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I have never been able to read Agatha Christie - the pleasure is purely in the puzzle, and the reader is toyed with by someone who didn't decide herself who the killer was until the end of the writing.
A. S. Byatt
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When I first started writing 'Still Missing,' I didn't actually realize I was writing a thriller. I thought it was more women's fiction, but during the many years of rewrites, I kept taking out the boring parts, and then my agent informed me that I had written a thriller.
Chevy Stevens
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Writing is like anything else - the more you do it, the better you get at it, the easier it comes, and the less concerned you'll be about what's going to happen to it, where it's going, what it sounds like, whether it's right.
Wayne Dyer
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As for critical writing about modernism, its moments of lucidity are but fulgurations illuminating the dark and incomprehensible landscape of its subject's unabashed difficulty.
Will Self
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Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it-whole-heartedly-and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings. sic
Arthur Quiller-Couch
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A tight structural form opens possibilities. Take a pattern, an established model or sub-genre, and write to it. In writing, limitation gives freedom
W. G. Sebald
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If I wrote in Jacob Riis' time, I'd be writing about teeming slums in our cities and kids dying of tuberculosis or outhouses in Philadelphia or kids losing their toes because they were living in homes without heat. He took on a battle in 'The Battle with the Slums' - and we won.
Matthew Desmond
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At the same time, it's a family story and more of an epic. I needed the third-person. I tried to give a sense that Cal, in writing his story, is perhaps inventing his past as much as recalling it.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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I think, basically, I am an actor. Sometimes I'm an actor who's writing and sometimes an actor who's directing, but I think if I'm forced to fill out a form for my tax return, 'actor' is the first thing I write down.
Chris Eigeman
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My dad and mom divorced when I was around ten, and I didn't live with him after that, though he was close by and we saw each other weekly. I wasn't really aware that he was a writer; I didn't start reading his writing until I was about fifteen. It occurred to me then that my dad was kind of special; he's still one of my favorite writers.
Andre Dubus III
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Everything in my life affects my writing. There are no separate parts of my life.
Patricia Reilly Giff
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I like to separate the music- and lyric-writing processes if I can. I'll sort of noodle around on my keyboard and my computer until I have a beat or a chord progression, I'll record it as a loop, export it to iTunes, then walk around with the loop and sort of talk to myself in the loop, and that's how I get the lyrics.
Lin-Manuel Miranda
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It's an extension of what I do also as part of making my living - I go into schools and work with kids on writing, and I do assembly programs often. Each one is different because each school has different requirements.
Deborah Wiles
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Directing is extrovert and gregarious; writing is isolating, introverted, and lonely.
David Farr
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When I write, I use an Underwood #5 made in 1920. Someone gave me an electric typewriter, but there's no use pretending you can use machinery that thinks faster than you do. An electric typewriter is ready to go before I have anything to say.
Andy Rooney
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Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.
Janet Frame
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TV critics, who traditionally hate television and make their living writing about it, often didn't like what I did on the air.
Charles Kuralt
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When I write, I try to capture one of those pivotal moments. If I succeed, I have shifted the reader's view of the world, just a little. The character is not the only one to experience change. That is my job, shifting perceptions, one story at a time. The trouble is, I don't like writing. But I love having written.
Ellen Klages
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To me, writing is remembering something funny that happened, or maybe something I said seven years ago.
Matthew Perry
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The art of songwriting is just stumbling your way to something really special, and you don't know what you're going to write until you are writing it. There is no formula. And, sometimes, you really have to work at it and hunker down.
Maren Morris
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Writing makes you feel better, to get it all out.
Taylor Dye
